' 'i'^" 



aV^' "^. 






.^■^ "^^ 



V 



^^"^k^y^ 



.'-^^ 



^A V^^ 



^z. V^' 



^ * « 1 



.""^ ..o- 



%.&^' :^:_ 



'^^ -"o 0^ 












•1 o '^ <^<^ 



^^./ 



0> 



> •$-. 



.-iv^ 



V 



."' -^^ >\ - - * rv " ' ' ;>!^ »:; %'% , 



'-i 



^ 
't^ 



'/'^ 



,^ 






.^^^ 






S.I 









IP l^t 



^. 












."^^ 



.^^\.^: 






1 



NATURAL RELIGION, 



<^^ 



Natural Religion. 




AUTHOR OF "ECCE HOMO." 



"We live by admiration.*^ 

Wordsworth. 



f4^r^h.$. ) 



BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1S82. 






Author's Edition. 

T/ie author of ^^ Natural Religion" has ar- 
ranged with Messrs, Roberts Brothers to publish his 
book in the United States, and it is his wish that they 
should not be inte7'fered with. 






1 



University Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



P R E F A C E. 



A NUMBER of papers bearing the title Natural 
Religion were contributed by the present writer 
to Macmillan's Magazine at irregular intervals 
from 1875 to 1878. Upon these papers this work 
is founded, but it is by no means a reprint of 
them. About two thirds of it may be said to be 
a reprint in respect of substance, though even 
here correction has been applied throughout, large 
additions and omissions made, and in some parts 
the original matter completely recast. The re- 
maining third part is^whoUy new in substance as 
well as in style. 

The reader must be cautioned not to enter upon 
this book with the expectation of finding in it 
anything calculated to promote either orthodoxy 
or heterodoxy. The author is one of those sim- 
pletons who believe that, alike in poutics and 
religion, there are truths outside the region of 
party debate, and that these truths are more im- 
portant than the contending parties will easily 
be induced to believe. In both departments — 
the reader will discover that to this author they 



VI PREFACE. 

are scarcely two departments, but almost one and 
the same — he watches with a kind of despair the 
infatuation of party-spirit gradually surrendering 
the whole area to dispute and denial and despising 
as insipid whatever is not controvertible, until 
perhaps at last, when the brawl subsides from 
mere exhaustion, a third party is heard proclaim- 
ing that when eleven men differ so much and so 
long, it is evident that nothing can be known, and 
possible even that there is nothing to know. In 
religion the evil is far more inveterate than in 
politics — and all the greater is the difficulty 
of the present attempt ; indeed we see religion 
suffering veritably the catastrophe of Poland, 
which found such a fatal enjoyment in quarrel- 
ling and quarrelled so long, that a day came at 
last when there was no Poland any more, and 
then the quarrelling ceased. 

May, 1882. 



CONTENTS. 

• 

PART I. 

Chapter Page 

I. God in Nature i 

II. The Abuse of the^ word "Atheism'^ . . 24 

in. The words *' Theology" and "Religion" 43 

IV. Three Kinds of Religion 69 

V. Natural Religion in Practice .... S6 

PART II. 

I. Religion and the World iii 

II. Religion and Culture . . • 131 

III. Natural Christianity 150 

IV. Natural Religion and the State ... 172 
V. Natural Religion and the Church . . 203 

Recapitulation 225 




CHAPTER I. 

GOD IN NATURE. 

When we listen to the newest school of the expounders 
of science we sometimes hear with surprise phrases 
which remind us of the peculiar dialect of Christianity. 
This happens when the subject is learning and learned 
men. Who does not remember St. Paul's contempt for 
" the wisdom of the world," for the Greeks to whom the 
Gospel was foolishness, and how the Apostle's contempt 
for learning has been echoed wherever Christian feeling 
has been vigorous, so that even learned Christians have 
despised their own learning and have taken a pleasure 
in placing themselves on a level with the ignorant? 
Who does not know how at the same time Christianity 
has contrasted the learning which it contemns with 
another kind of knowledge which it prizes infinitely ? 
Wealth, power, everything that is counted desirable, 
Christians despise in comparison with a certain kind of 
knowledge. It is among these things comparatively des- 
picable that they class what is commonly called learning. 
They despise it not as learning, but as learning com- 
paratively worthless in quality, a counterfeit of the true 
learning which it is happiness and salvation to possess. 

Now in this respect scientific men now hold the very 
same language. They resemble Christians in treating 



2 NATURAL RELIGION. 

with great contempt what goes by the name of learning 
and philosophy, in comparison with another sort of wis- 
dom which they believe themselves to possess. In praise 
of knowledge they grow eloquent, and use language of 
scriptural elevation. It is their unceasing cry that all 
good is to be expected from the increase of true knowl- 
edge ; that the happiness both of the race and individ- 
uals depends upon the advance of real science, and the 
application of it to human life. Yet they have a con- 
tempt for learning, which is just as Christian in its tone 
as their love for knowledge. ^'Erudition" and "phi- 
losophy" are terms of contempt in their mouths. They 
denounce the former as a busy idleness, and the latter 
as a sham wisdom, consisting mainly of empty words, 
and offering solutions either imaginary or unintelligible 
of problems which are either imaginary or unintelligible 
themselves. All members of the modern school are, it 
is true, not equally plain-spoken ; some will profess to 
admire scholarship and erudition, speaking of it as a 
graceful accomplishment; and it is only in unguarded 
moments that they betray their conviction that it is noth- 
ing more ; but others proclaim it loudly, and a few even 
wish to bring public opinion to bear upon the matter, so 
as to suppress as an immorality the acquiring of useless 
knowledge. 

Thus, the old religious school, and that new school 
whose convictions we see now gradually acquiring the 
character of a religion, agree in combining a passionate 
love for what they believe true knowledge with a con- 
tempt for so-called learning and philosophy. The com- 
mon enemy of both is what the one school calls, and the 
other might well call, "the wisdom of the world." But 



GOD IN NATURE. 3 

though agreeing so far, these two schools hate their com- 
mon enemy much less than they hate each other. For 
each regards the "true wisdom " of the other as worse 
and more mischievous than the wisdom of the world 
which each rejects. To the scientific school the Chris- 
tian *^ hidden wisdom " is a mystical superstition, com- 
pared with which " learning and philosophy " are science 
itself. To the Christian, modern science is a darkness 
compared with which the science that St. Paul rejected 
might almost be called Christianity. 

Nothing is so terrible as this clashing of opposite re- 
ligions. Differences on subjects of the first importance 
are always painful, but the direct shock of contrary en- 
thusiasms has something appalling about it. That one 
man's highest truth should be another man's deadliest 
falsehood ; that one man should be ready to die in dis- 
interested self-devotion for a cause which another man 
is equally ready to oppose at the sacrifice of his life ; 
this is a horror which is none the less horrible because 
it has often been witnessed on our perplexed planet. 
But often it has been perceived, long after the conflict 
was over, that there had been misapprehension, that the 
difference of opinion was not really anything like so com- 
plete as it seemed. Nay, it has often happened that a 
later generation has seen the difference to be very small 
indeed, and has wondered that so much could have 
been made of it. In such cases the mind is reheved of 
that fancy of a radical discord in human nature. We 
see that self-devotions have not really clashed in such 
fell antagonism. We recognize that self-devotion may 
be alloyed with less noble feelings, with some that are 
blamable and some that are even ludicrous, with mere 



4 NATURAL RELIGION. 

pugnacity, with the passion of gratifying self-importance, 
with the half noble pleasure that there is in fighting, and 
the ignoble pleasure that there is in giving pain. 

It would certainly be hard enough to show that the 
present strife between Christianity and Science is one in 
which insignificant differences are magnified by the im- 
agination of the combatants. The question is nothing 
less than this, whether we are to regard the grave with 
assured hope, and the ties between human beings as in- 
dissoluble by death ; or, on the other hand, to dismiss the 
hope of a future life as too doubtful to be worth consider- 
ing, even if not absolutely chimerical. No reasoning can 
make such a difference into a small one. But even 
where the differences are so great, it may still be worth 
while to call attention to the points of agreement. If 
there is some truth, however small, upon which all can 
agree, then there is some action upon which all can 
unite ; and who can tell how much may be done by 
anything so rare as absolute unanimity? Moreover, if 
we look below the surface of controversy, we shall com- 
monly find more agreement and less disagreement than 
we had expected. Agreement is slow of speech and at- 
tracts little notice, disagreement has always plenty to say 
for itself Agreement utters chiefly platitudes and tru- 
isms. And yet, though platitudes and truisms do not 
work up into interesting books, if our object is to accom- 
plish something for human life, we shall scarcely find any 
truth serviceable that has not been rubbed into a truism, 
and scarcely any maxim that has not been worn . into a 
platitude. Let the attempt then be made for once to 
apply this principle in the greatest and most radical 
of all controversies. Let us put religion by the side of 



GOD IN NATURE. 



5 



science in its latest most aggressive form, with the view 
not of trying the question between them, but simply of 
measuring how mucH ground is common to both. In 
their tone, in their attitude towards philosophy and 
learning there seems some resemblance. Let us ex- 
amine this resemblance more closely. 

We are all familiar with the language used by Christians 
in disparagement of learning. God, they say, has revealed 
to men all that is essential for them to know. By the 
side of revealed knowledge what the human intellect can 
discover for itself is of little importance. If it seem to 
clash with revelation it is mischievous ; if not, it may be 
useful in a subordinate degree. But at the best it is con- 
temptible by the side of the '^one thing needful; " and 
the greatest discoverer that ever lived is a trifler compared 
with the most simple-minded Christian who has studied 
to fulfil the requirements of the Gospel. 

There is indeed a true erudition and a true philosophy, 
the subject of which is God's revelation itself Scholars, 
profoundly read in the sources of theology, whether they 
be supposed to be the Bible or Christian Antiquity, phi- 
losophers who have made the Christian revelation their 
basis, or have collected and elucidated the evidences of 
it — these are truly wise, and escape the censure of fri- 
volity under which secular learning lies ; but even these, 
illustrious and venerable as they may be, will acknowledge 
that there is a wisdom beyond their own, which the 
humblest Christian may possess, the wisdom of simple 
belief and love. 

We are less familiar as yet with the invectives of scien- 
tific men against what has long passed for learning and 
philosophy in the world. Different sections of the sWen- 



6 NATURAL RELIGION. 

tific school bring the accusation in different language. 
Yet the same feeling, the same strong and contemptuous 
conviction, pervades the whole school. What they assail 
seems to be, in two words, knowledge based on author- 
ity, and knowledge wanting an inductive basis. 

That the utterances of great and famous philosophers 
are to be taken as truth, that in philosophy as in the 
civil law, the responsa prudentiim have a binding force, 
has been accepted in some departments of knowledge up 
to the present day. Long after the authority of Aristotle 
had been shaken new thinkers were allowed to occupy a 
similar place in some branches, and from Descartes to 
Hegel a sort of monarchical rule has prevailed in meta- 
physics. Science as distinguished from philosophy has 
always been more republican. Not that it refuses to 
reverence superior minds, not perhaps that it is altogether 
incapable of yielding to the temptation of trusting a par- 
ticular authority for a while too much, or following a 
temporary fashion. But as a general rule it rejects as a 
superstition the notion that the most superior mind is at 
all infallible ; it dissents without scruple from those whom 
it reverences most; and on the other hand the most 
eminent members of it encourage this freedom, are well 
pleased to be contradicted, and avoid assuming an 
oracular style as a mark of charlatanry. We see now the 
regime of science established in philosophy also ; the 
autocracy of Hegel comes to an end, not by the acces- 
sion of a new monarch, but rather by the proclamation 
of a republic in German philosophy. 

It is a change of system in the intellectual world, by 
which much established doctrine is branded with the 
mark of spuriousness. In theology, metaphysics, moral 



-./ 



GOD IN NATURE. 7 

and political philosophy, history, the principle of author- 
ity has reigned hitherto with more or less exclusiveness, 
and the repudiation of it makes a revolution in those 
departments of knowledge. Authoritative treatises are 
consigned to oblivion, ancient controversies cease, the 
whole store of learning hived up in many capacious 
memories becomes worthless. The change throw^s dis- 
credit at the same time upon the very name of erudition ; 
not as such, for there is a kind of erudition much appre- 
ciated by the scientific school; but because erudition, 
as hitherto understood, has commonly gone along with, 
has in a great degree grown out of, an excessive rever- 
ence for the opinions of famous men. All that part of 
erudition, in particular, which may be called in a word 
" commentatorship," begins to seem superstitious and 
childish, when the general estimate of human wisdom so 
decidedly sinks. 

But the more important change is in the extension of 
the methods of physical science to the whole domain of 
knowledge. While one part of the ^Svisdom of the 
world" has been discredited as resting solely on author- 
ity, another large division of it is now rejected as resting on 
insufficient induction, and another as resting on ground- 
less assumptions, disguised under the name of necessary 
truths, truths of the reason, truths given in consciousness, 
&c. No one needs to be told what havoc this physical 
method is making with received systems, and it produces 
a sceptical disposition of mind towards primary principles 
which have been thought to lie deeper than all systems. 
Those current abstractions, which make up all the moral- 
ity and all the philosophy of most people, have been 
brought under suspicion. Mind and matter, duties and 



8 NATURAL RELIGION. 

rights, morality and expediency, honor and interest, virtue 
and vice, — all these words, which seemed once to ex- 
press elementary and certain realities, now strike us as 
just the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, 
might dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy 
which is discredited, but just that homely and popular 
wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it 
appears, instead of being the sterhng product of plain 
experience, is the overflow of an immature philosophy, 
the redundance of the uncontrolled speculations of think- 
ers who were unacquainted with scientific method. 

This second change leads to self- distrust, as the first 
led to distrust of other men. As we learn not to take 
our truth at second-hand from other thinkers, so we learn 
that we must not take it, if the expression may be used, 
firom ourselves. Truth is not what we think, any more 
than it is what famous men have thought. That which 
irresistibly strikes us as true, that which seems self-evident, 
that which commends itself to us, may nevertheless, we 
learn, not be true at all. It is not enough to judge for 
ourselves, to examine the facts independently. We must 
examine the facts according to a rigorous method, which 
has been elaborated by a long series of investigators, and 
without which neither candor nor impartiality would save 
us either from seeing wrong, or from receiving unsound 
evidence, or from generalizing too fast, or from allowing 
some delusive name to come between us and the reality. 
Distrust of others, distrust of ourselves — if the first of 
these two factors of the scientific spirit were separated 
from the second, the result would be mere self-conceit, 
mere irreverence. As it is, the scientific spirit is simply 
a jealous watchfulness against that tendency of human 



GOD IN NATURE. q 

nature to read itself into the Universe, which is both 
natural to each individual and may mislead the very 
greatest investigators, and which can only be controlled 
by rigorously adhering to a fixed process, and rigidly 
verifying the work of others by the same. 

Such untested knowledge might very fitly be called 
by the name which Christianity uses. It might be called 
''human knowledge," or ''the wisdom of the world." 
For the difference between it and genuine knowledge is 
just this, that it is adulterated by a human element. It 
is not the result of a contact between the universe and 
the naked human intelligence. The perceiving mind has 
mixed itself up with the thing perceived, and not merely in 
the way in which it always must, in the way which con- 
stitutes cognition, but in quite other and arbitrary ways, 
by wishes, by prejudices, by crotchets, by dreams. Such 
humanized views of the Universe have a peculiar though 
cheap attractiveness. They naturally please the human 
mind, because, in fact, they were expressly contrived to 
do so. They adapt themselves readily to rhetoric and 
poetry, because, in fact, they are rhetoric and poetry in 
disguise. To reject them is to mortify human nature ; 
it is an act of vigorous asceticism. It is to renounce the 
world as truly as the Christian does when he protests 
against fashionable vices. It is to reject a pleasant thing 
on the ground that it is insincere ; that it is not in fact 
what it professes to be. The moral attitude of the man 
who does it is just such as Hebrew prophets assumed 
towards the flattering and lying court- prophets of their 
day ; just such as the earliest Christianity assumed 
towards Pharisaism ; just such as Luther and Knox 
assumed towards the secularized Church of the later 



lO NATURAL RELIGION. 

Middle Age. It is an attitude of indignant sincerity, an 
attitude marking an inward determination to accept the 
trutli of the Universe, however disagreeable, and not 
to allow it to be adulterated and drugged, so as to suit 
our human feebleness. If we cannot produce from the 
Scriptures of our religion texts directly sanctioning it, 
this is because the particular problem was not presented 
in ancient times to the Jewish nation. Those Scriptures 
are full of passages expressing in poetic forms and in 
language suited to another age the spirit of modern 
science. Notably, the book of Job, not in occasional 
passages only, but as its main object and drift, contrasts 
the conventional, and, as it w^ere, orthodox view of the 
Universe, with the view which those obtain wdio are pre- 
pared to face its awfulness directly. 

Thus the religious view and the scientific view of the 
Universe, which are thought to be so opposite, agree in 
this important point. Both protest earnestly against 
human wisdom. Both wait for a message which is to 
come to them from without. Religion says, '' Let man 
be silent, and Hsten when God speaks." Science says, 
" Let us interrogate Nature, and let us be sure that the 
answer we get is really Nature's, and not a mere echo 
of our own voice." Now w^hether or not religion and 
science agree in what they recommend, it is evident thart 
they agree in w^hat they denounce. They agree in de- 
nouncing that pride of the human intellect which sup- 
poses it knows everything, which is not passive enough 
in the presence of reality, but deceives itself with pom- 
pous words instead of things, and with flattering elo- 
quence instead of sober truth. 

Here, however, it will be said, the agreement between 



GOD IN NATURE. I I 

religion and science ends, and even this agreement is 
only apparent. Science protests against the idols or de- 
lusions of the human intellect, in order that it may sub- 
stitute for them the reality of Nature ; religion sacrifices 
all those idols to the greatest of them all, which is God. 
For what is God — so the argument runs — but a hy- 
pothesis, which religious men have mistaken for a demon- 
strated reality ? And is it not precisely against such pre- 
mature hypotheses that science most strenuously pro- 
tests ? That a Personal Will is the cause of the Universe 
— this might stand very well as a hypothesis to work 
with, until facts should either confirm it, or force it to 
give way to another either different or at least modified. 
That this Personal Will is benevolent, and is shown to be 
so by the facts of the Universe, which evince a provi- 
dential care for man and other animals — this is just one 
of those plausibiHties, which passed muster before scien- 
tific method was understood — but modern science re- 
jects it as unproved. Modern science holds that there 
may be design in the Universe, but that to penetrate the 
design is, and probably always will be, beyond the power 
of the human understanding. That this Personal Will 
has on particular occasions revealed itself by breaking 
through the customary order of the Universe, and per- 
forming what are called miracles — this — it is said — is 
one of those legends of which histories were full, until a 
stricter view of evidence was introduced, and the modern 
critical spirit sifted thoroughly the annals of the world. 
But if modern science be right in these opinions, the very 
notion of God seems to be removed altogether from the 
domain of practical life. So long as God appeared cer- 
tainly to exist. He necessarily eclipsed and reduced to 



12 NATURAL RELIGION. 

insignificance all other existences. So long as it was 
held possible to discover His will and mind, all other in- 
quiries might reasonably be pronounced frivolous. But 
all is changed as soon as we begin to regard His exist- 
ence as a mere hypothesis, and His will as inscrutable and 
beyond the reach of the human understanding. Not 
only is all changed, but all is reversed. Instead of being 
the one important question, God's will now becomes the 
one ///^important question because the one question which 
it is essentially impossible to answer. Whereas before 
we might charge men with frivolity who neglected this 
inquiry for inquiries the most important in themselves, 
now we may pronounce the shallowest dilettante, the most 
laboriously idle antiquary, a solid and sensible man com- 
pared to the theologian. They pursue, to be sure, very 
minute objects, but they do or may attain them ; the theo- 
logian attempts an impossibility — he is like the child 
who tries to reach the beginning of the rainbow. 

It would appear, then, that that which I have called 
*^ human wisdom," and which is the butt at the same 
time of theology and science, is so because it is a kind 
of middle party between two mortally hostile factions. 
It is like the Girondins between the Royalists and the 
Jacobins ; both may oppose, and may even in a par- 
ticular case combine to oppose it, and yet they may feel 
not the slightest sympathy with each other. And the 
middle party once crushed, there will follow no recon- 
ciliation, but a mortal contest between the extremes. 

Is this so or is it otherwise ? The question is whether 
the statement given above of the theological view of the 
Universe is exhaustive or not ? Is it all summed up in 
the three propositions that a Personal Will is the cause 



GOD IN NATURE. I 3 

of the Universe, that that Will is perfectly benevolent, that 
that Will has sometimes interfered by miracles with the 
order of the Universe ? If these propositions exhaust it, 
and science throws discredit upon all of them, evidently 
theology and science are irreconcilable, and the contest 
between them must end in the destruction of one or the 
other. 

It may be remarked, in the first place, that these 
propositions are not so much an abstract of theology as 
of the particular theology now current. That God is 
perfectly benevolent is a maxim of popular Christianity, 
and it may be supported by Biblical texts. But it is not 
necessary to theology or religion as such. Many nations 
have believed in gods of mixed or positively malignant 
character. Other nations have indeed ascribed to their 
deities all the admirable quahties they could conceive, 
but benevolence was not one of these. They have 
believed in gods that were beautiful, powerful, immortal, 
happy, but not benevolent. It may even be said that 
the Bible and Christianity itself have not uniformly 
represented God as perfectly benevolent. In the Old 
Testament He is described as just, but at the same time 
terrible and pitiless against the wicked and even the 
children of the wicked ; and at least one form of modern 
Christianity, Calvinism, takes a view of the Divine char- 
acter which it is impossible to reconcile with infinite 
benevolence. Moreover, if almost all theologies have 
introduced what we should describe as miracle, yet it 
would be very incorrect to class many of them in this 
respect with that current view of Christianity which rep- 
resents God as demonstrating His existence by occa- 
sional interruptions of the order, otherwise invariable, 



14 NATURAL RELIGION. 

of Nature. Probably, in the majority of theologies, no 
other law of nature, except the will of God, is recog- 
nized ; miracle when it is introduced is not regarded as 
breaking through any order ; the very notion implied in 
the word "supernatural" is unacknowledged; miracu- 
lous occurrences are not distinguished from ordinary 
ones, except as being rarer, and are not distinguished 
from rare occurrences at all. To an ancient Jew prob- 
ably an earthquake and the staying of the sun on Gibeon 
were occurrences of precisely the same character, and not 
distinguished as they are in our minds, the one as rare but 
natural, the other as supernatural and miraculous. All 
that was miraculous might have been removed from the 
creed of an ancient Jew without shaking his theology. 

Two out of the three propositions then are not neces- 
sary to the theological view of the Universe. But surely 
the third is. Surely all theology implies that a Personal 
Will is the cause of the Universe. Well, but how? In 
the first place, it is a very shallow view of theologies 
which represents them as having in all cases sprung from 
speculation about causes. True that we can trace this 
speculation in our own religion. The phenomena of the 
world are accounted for very manifestly in the book of 
Genesis by the fiat of a Personal Will. But this is not at 
all an invariable character of theology. The Deity of a 
thing is often regarded in theologies not at all as the 
cause of it, but in quite another way, perhaps I might 
say as the unity of it. No one has ever supposed that 
the Greeks regarded Poseidon as the cause of the sea. 
Athena may have been suggested to them by the sky, 
but she is not the cause of the sky. And it would be 
easy to conceive a theology which did not occupy itself 



GOD IN NATURE. I J 

at all with causes, but which at the same time conceived 
the separate phenomena of the Universe, or the Universe 
itself altogether personally, 

" Yes, personally ! Here, then, at any rate, we have 
the invariable characteristic of theology, namely, in the 
use it makes of personality. Not necessarily as a cause, 
but in some way as an explanation, or, at least, as a help 
to conception, theologies introduce personaHty where 
science sees only impersonal force." Even this state- 
ment is loose enough. Personality entire has never been 
attributed in any theology to deities. Personality, as we 
know it, involves mortality. Deities are usually supposed 
immortal. Personality involves a body. The highest 
theologies have declared God to be incorporeal. May 
we then fall back upon the will and say. Theologies at- 
tribute to deities a will Hke that of human beings ? But 
again the highest theologies assert that the Divine Will 
is high above the human ; that there is ^^ no searching " 
of it ; '' that as the heaven is high above the earth, so 
are His ways than our ways, and His thoughts than our 
thoughts." 

If the possibility of miracles were entirely given up, 
and the order of nature decided to be as invariable as 
science inclines to consider it ; if all the appearances of 
benevolent design in the Universe were explained away, 
it might be true that the belief in God would cease to 
be consoling. Instead of being a spring of life and 
activity, it might — I am not now saying it would — 
become a depressing and overwhelming influence. And 
this, no doubt, is what people mean when they identify, 
as they commonly do, the belief in God with belief in 
an overruling Benevolence and in the supernatural. 



1 6 NATURAL RELIGION. 

They mean to say, not exactly that the belief in God is 
necessarily this, but that to be in any way useful or bene- 
ficial it must necessarily be this. But for my present 
purpose it is important to distinguish between the God 
in whom ordinary people at the present day beheve and 
a God of another character in whom they might con- 
ceivably beheve. I desire to insist upon the point that 
when science speaks of God as a myth or a hypothesis, 
and declares the existence of God to be doubtful and 
destined always to remain doubtful, it is speaking of 
a particular conception of God, of God conceived as 
benevolent, as outside of nature, as personal, as the 
cause of phenomena. Do these attributes of benevo- 
lence, personahty, &c., exhaust the idea of God? Are 
they — not merely the most important, the most consol- 
ing of His attributes, but — the only ones ? By denying 
them do we cease not merely to be orthodox Christians 
but to be theists ? 

Science opposes to God Nature. When it denies 
God it denies the existence of any power beyond or 
superior to Nature ; and it may deny at the same time 
anything like a caicse of Nature. It believes in certain 
laws of co-existence and sequence in phenomena, and in 
denying God it means to deny that anything further 
can be known. God and Nature then express notions 
which are different in an important particular. But it 
is evident enough that these notions are not the opposites 
that controversy would represent them to be. On the 
contrary, they coincide up to a certain point. Those 
who beheve in Nature may deny God, but those who 
believe in God, beheve, as a matter of course, in Nature 
also, since God includes Nature, as the whole includes 



GOD IN NATURE. 



17 



the part. It is no doubt fashionable to represent the- 
ology as disregarding Nature, as passing by the laws 
which govern the Universe, and occupying itself solely 
with occasional suspensions of them, or with ulterior, 
inscrutable causes. But this conception of theology is 
derived from a partial view of it. It answers well 
enough to a modern phase into which theology has 
passed since it was expelled from the domain of Nature 
by the rival and victorious method of physical science. 
To the older theologies it is wholly inapplicable. They 
occupied themselves quite as much with laws as with 
causes ; so far from being opposed to science, they were 
in fact themselves science in a rudimentary form ; so 
far from neglecting the natural for the supernatural, 
they scarcely recognized any distinction between them. 
The true object of theology at the beginning was to 
throw light upon natural laws ; it used no doubt a crude 
method, and in some cases it attempted problems 
which modern science calls insoluble. Then, when a 
new method was introduced, theology stuck obstinately 
to its old one, and when the new method proved itself 
successful, theology gradually withdrew into those do- 
mains where as yet the old method was not threatened, 
and might still reign without opposition. Thus it be- 
gan to be supposed that law appertained to science, 
and suspension of law or miracle to theology ; that 
the one was concerned with Nature, and the other with 
that which was above Nature. Gradually the name of 
God began to be associated with the supernatural, until 
scientific men began to say they had nothing to do with 
God, and theologians to find something alien to them in 
the word Nature. 



I 8 NATURAL RELIGION. 

Yet theology can never go further than this in repu- 
diating Nature. It can never deny that Nature is an 
ordinance of God ; it can never question that the laws 
of Nature are among the laws of God. It may in- 
deed treat them as His less important laws, or as a 
revelation of Him which is not precisely the revela- 
tion we want. But it cannot and does not deny that 
Nature too is a revelation of God ; it ought not to 
deny that there is a theology which may be called 
natural, and which does not consist in a collection of 
the evidences of benevolent design in the Universe, 
but in a true deduction of the laws which govern the 
Universe, whatever those laws may be, and whatever 
they may seem to indicate concerning the character 
of God. 

But if, on the one hand, the study of Nature be one 
part of the study of God, is it not true, on the other, 
that he who believes only in Nature is a theist, and has 
a theology ? Men slide easily from the most momentous 
controversies into the most contemptible logomachies. 
If we will look at things, and not merely at words, we 
shall soon see that the scientific man has a theology and 
a God, a most impressive theology, a most awful and 
glorious God. I say that man believes in a God who 
feels himself in the presence of a Power which is not him- 
self and is immeasurably above himself, a Power in the 
contemplation of which he is absorbed, in the knowledge 
of which he finds safety and happiness. And such now 
is Nature to the scientific man. I do not now say that 
it is good or satisfying to worship such a God, but I say 
that no class of men since the world began have ever 
more truly believed in a God, or more ardently, or with 



GOD IN NATURE. 



19 



more conviction, worshipped Him. Comparing their 
rehgion in its fresh youth to the present confused forms 
of Christianity, I think a bystander would say that though 
Christianity had in it something far higher and deeper 
and more ennobhng, yet the average scientific man wor- 
ships just at present a more awful, and, as it were, a 
greater Deity than the average Christian. In so many 
Christians the idea of God has been degraded by childish 
and little-minded teaching ; the Eternal and the Infinite 
and the All-embracing has been represented as the head 
of the clerical interest, as a sort of clergyman, as a sort 
of schoolmaster, as a sort of philanthropist. But the 
scientific man knows Him to be eternal ; in astronomy, 
in geology, he becomes familiar with the countless millen- 
niums of His lifetime. The scientific man strains his 
mind actually to realize God's infinity. As far oft' as the 
fixed stars he traces Him, ^Mistance inexpressible by 
numbers that have name." Meanwhile, to the theolo- 
gian, infinity and eternity are very much of empty words 
when applied to the Object of his worship. He does 
not realize them in actual facts and definite computations. 
But it is not merely because he reahzes a stupendous 
Power that I call the scientific man a theist. A true 
theist should recognize his Deity as giving him the law 
to which his life ought to be conformed. Now here it is 
that the resemblance of modern science to theology comes 
out most manifestly. There is no stronger conviction in 
this age than the conviction of the scientific man, that 
all happiness depends upon the knowledge of the laws 
of Nature, and the careful adaptation of human life to 
them. Of this I have spoken before. Luther and Cal- 
vin were not more jealous of the Church tradition that 



20 NATUR-AL RELIGION. 

had obscured the true word of God in the Scriptures 
than the modem man of science is of the metaphysics 
and conventional philosophy that have beguiled men 
away from Nature and her laws. They want to remodel 
all education, all preaching, so that the laws of Kature 
may become kno^^Tl to ever}' man, and that every one 
may be in a condition to find his happiness in obeying 
them. They cliafe at the notion of men studpng any- 
thing else. They behave towards those who do not know 
Nature with the same sort of impatient insolence with 
which a Christian behaved towards the worshippers of 
the Emperor or a Mohammedan towards idolaters. As 
I sympathize ver}' partially with the ^Mohammedan, and 
not quite perfectly with the early Christian, so I find the 
modem scientific zeal sometimes narrow and fanatical ; 
but I recognize that it is zeal of the same kind as theirs, 
that, like theirs, it is theological. 

An infinite Power will inspire awe and an anxious 
desire to avoid a collision with it. But such awe and 
fear, it may be said, do not constitute worship ; worship 
imphes admiration, and something which may be called 
love. Now it is true that the scientific man cannot feel 
for Nature such love as a pious mind may feel for the 
God of Christians. The highest love is inspired by 
love, or by justice and goodness, and of these qualities 
science as yet discerns little or nothing in Nature. But 
a very genuine love, though of a lower kind, is felt by 
the contemplator of Nature. Nature, even if we hesi- 
tate to call it good, is infinitely interesting, infinitely 
beautiful. He who studies it has continually the ex- 
quisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and 
divining /azus ; regularities ghmmer through an appear- 



GOD IN NATURE. 21 

ance of confusion ; analogies between phenomena of a 
different order suggest themselves and set the imagina- 
tion in motion ; the mind is haunted with the sense of 
a vast unity not yet discoverable or namable. There 
is food for contemplation which never runs short ; you 
gaze at an object which is always growing clearer, and 
yet always, in the very act of growing clearer, present- 
ing new mysteries. And this arresting and absorbing 
spectacle, so fascinating by its variety, is at the same 
time overwhelming by its greatness ; so that those who 
have devoted their lives to the contemplation scarcely 
ever fail to testify to the endless delight it gives them, 
and also to the overpowering awe with which from time 
to time it surprises them. 

There is one more feeling which a worshipper should 
have for his Deity, a sense of personal connection, and, 
as it were, relationship. The last verse of a hymn of 
praise is very appropriately this — " for this God is our 
God for ever and ever ; He will be our guide even unto 
death." This feeling, too, the worshipper of Nature 
has. He cannot separate himself from that which he 
contemplates. Though he has the power of gazing 
upon it as something outside himself, yet he knows 
himself to be a part of it. The same laws whose 
operations he watches in the Universe, he may study in 
his own body. Heat and light and gravitation govern 
himself as they govern plants and heavenly bodies. 
*' In Him,'' may the worshipper of this Deity say with 
intimate conviction, ^^ in Him we live and move and 
have our being." When men whose minds are pos- 
sessed with a thought like this, and whose lives are 
devoted to such a contemplation, say, '' As for God, we 



22 NATURAL RELIGION. 

know nothing of Him ; science knows nothing of Him ; 
it is a name belonging to an extinct system of philoso- 
phy j " I think they are playing with words. By what 
name they call the object of their contemplation is in 
itself a matter of little importance. Whether they say 
God, or prefer to say Nature, the important thing is 
that their minds are filled with the sense of a Power to 
all appearance infinite and eternal, a Power to which 
their own being is inseparably connected, in the 
knowledge of whose ways alone is safety and well- 
being, in the contemplation of which they find a beatific 
vision. 

Well ! this God is also the God of Christians. That 
the God of Christians is something more does not affect 
this fact. Nature, according to all systems of Christian 
theology, is God's ordinance. Whether with science 
you stop short at Nature, or with Christianity believe 
in a God who is the author of Nature, in either case 
Nature is divine, for it is either God or the work of 
God. This whole domain is common to science and 
theology. When theology says, Let us give up the 
wisdom of men and listen to the voice of God, and 
when science says. Let us give up human authority and 
hollow a priori knowledge and let us listen to Nature, 
they are agreed to the whole extent of the narrower 
proposition, i. e., theology ought to admit all that 
science says, though science admits only a part of what 
theology says. Theology cannot say the laws of Nature 
are not divine ; all it can say is, they are not the most 
important of the divine laws. Perhaps not, but they 
gain an importance from the fact that they are laws 
upon which all can agree. Making the largest allow- 



GOD IN NATURE. 23 

ance for discoveries about which science may be too 
confident, there remains a vast mass of natural knowl- 
edge which no one questions. This to the Christian is 
so much knowledge about God, and he ought to exult 
quite as much as the man of science in the rigorous 
method by which it has been separated from the human 
prejudice and hasty ingenuity and delusive rhetoric or 
poetry which might have adulterated it. By this means 
we have been enabled to hear a voice which is unmis- 
takably God's. And if it seems to be God speaking 
about matters not the most important, still perhaps it 
may be as well to listen. So much, at least, reverence 
would dictate ; and if it did not, the urgent necessity 
for more agreement on fundamental questions would 
dictate it imperiously. 



24 NATURAL RELIGION. 



CIL\PTER 11. 



I ILWE suggested the thought of a God revealed in 
Nature, not by any means because such a view of God 
seems to me satisfactory, or worthy to replace the Chris- 
tian view, or even as a commencement from which we 
must rise by logical necessity to the Christian view. I 
have suggested it because tliis is the God Whom the 
present age actually does, and, in spite of all opposition, 
certainly ^^ill worship, also because this aspect of God is 
common to all theologies, however much in some it may 
be slighted or depreciated, and lastly, because I do not 
believe that any theology can be real or satisfying that 
does not make it prominent as well as admit it. I can 
conceive no rehgion as satisfactory that falls short of 
Christianity, but, on the other hand, I cannot believe any 
religion to be healthy that does not start from Nature- 
worship. It is in the free and instinctive admiration of 
human beings for the glory of heaven, earth and sea, that 
religion — so far as religion is the name of a good and 
healthy thing — begins, and I cannot imagine but as 
morbid a religion which has ceased to admire them. 

But many religious men will probably think that not 
much is to be hoped from dwelling on this subject. 
" We know very well that the Universe is glorious, but 



ABUSE OF THE WORD '^ATHEISM. 25 

when you have said that, there is an end of the matter. 
We want to make atheists believe in God, and you do it 
not by changing their minds, but by changing the mean- 
ing of the word God. It is not a verbal controversy that 
rages between atheists and Christians ; it is the great 
controversy of the age. Two opposite theories of the 
Universe are in conflict. On the one side is the greatest 
of all affirmations, on the other the most fatal of all nega- 
tions. There never yet was a controversy which was not 
trivial in comparison with this. It is cruel trifling to 
speak of compromise, it is waste of time to draw verbal 
distinctions. Let atheism be atheism, and ^ darkness 
keep her raven gloss ! ' Away with the plausible defini- 
tions which would make it impossible for any rational 
being ever to be an atheist ! " 

Now why should we be so wilful as to forget that the 
error of monstrously over-estimating doctrinal differences 
has been all along the plague of theology ? There can be 
no greater mistake than to measure the real importance 
of a dispute by the excitement of the disputants. It has 
often been remarked of theological controversies, that 
they are never conducted more bitterly than when the 
difference between the rival doctrines is very small. This 
is nearly correct, but not quite. If you want to see the 
true white heat of controversial passion, if you want to 
see men fling away the very thought of reconciliation, 
and close in internecine conflict, you should look at con- 
troversialists who do not differ at all, but who have 
adopted different words to express the same opinion. 

In the controversy which now fills the world and seems 
not unlikely to give a lurid tinge to the setting of the 
nineteenth century, there is surely a fair proportion of 



26 NATURAL RELIGION. 

the old misconception and bewilderment. The real 
issue is no doubt a great one, but it is not so great as the 
issue between tlieism and atheism. That a party calls 
itself atheistic matters little ; when did any party name 
itself accurately ? These so-called atheists do not always 
appear to be divided from plain people by the whole 
diameter. Some of them are so, but others are not so. 
This must be because they have been misnamed. 

An atheist in the proper sense of the word is not a man 
who disbelieves in the goodness of God, or in His dis- 
tinctness from Nature, or in His personality. These 
disbeliefs may be as serious in their way as atheism, but 
they are different. Atheism is a disbelief in the existence 
of God — that is, a disbelief in any regularity in the 
Universe to which a man must conform himself under 
penalties. Such a disbelief is speculatively monstrous ; 
it is a kind of mental deficiency or perversion, but so 
commonly are the false views which lead to immoral 
action. 

There is an atheism which is a mere speculative 
crotchet, and there is an atheism which is a great 
moral disease. Let me illustrate the latter, which is 
the real atheism, by some specimens. 

The purest form of such real atheism might be called 
by the general name of wilfuhtess. All human activity 
is a transaction with Nature. It is the arrangement of a 
compromise between what we want on the one hand, and 
what Nature has decreed on the other. Something of 
our own wishes we have almost always to give up ; but 
by carefully considering the power outside ourselves, the 
necessity that conditions all our actions, we may make 
better terms than we could otherwise, and reduce to a 



ABUSE OF THE WORD "ATHEISM. 



27 



minimum what we are obliged to renounce. Now we 
may either underrate or overrate the force of our own 
wills. The first is the extravagance of theism ; it is that 
fatalism which steals so naturally upon those who have 
dwelt much upon the thought of God, which is said to 
paralyze, for example, the whole soul of the Mussulman. 
But the opposite mistake is a deficiency of theism ; a 
touch of it often marks the hero, but the fulness of it is 
that kind of blind infatuation which poets have repre- 
sented under the image of the giants who tried to storm 
heaven. Not to recognize anything but your own will, 
to fancy anything within your reach if you only will 
strongly enough, to acknowledge no superior Power out- 
side yourself which must be considered and in some way 
propitiated if you would succeed in any undertaking; 
this is complete wilfulness, or, in other words, pure athe- 
ism. It may also be called childishness, for the child 
naturally discovers the force within it sooner than the 
resisting necessity outside. Not without a few falls in 
the wrestle with Nature do we learn the limits of our own 
power and the pitiless immensity of the power that is 
not ours. But there are many who cannot learn this 
lesson even from experience, who forget every defeat 
they suffer, and always refuse to see any power in the 
Universe but their own wills. Sometimes, indeed, they 
discover their mistake too late. Many barbarous races 
are in this condition. In their childishness they have 
engaged themselves in a direct conflict with Nature. In- 
stead of negotiating with her, they have declared a blind 
war. They have adopted habits which they gradually 
discover to be leading them to destruction ; but they 
discover it too late and when they are too deeply com- 



28 NATURAL RELIGION. 

promised. Then we see the despair of the atheistic 
nation, and its wild struggles as it feels itself caught in 
the whirlpool ; then, a little later, we find that no such 
nation exists, and on the map its seat begins to be covered 
with names belonging to another language. Less extreme 
and unredeemed, the same Titanism may sometimes be 
remarked in races called civiHzed. Races might be 
named that are undergoing punishments Httle less severe 
for this insensate atheism. " Sedet aeternumque sedebit/' 
that unhappy Poland, not indeed extinguished but par- 
titioned, and every thirty years decimated anew. She 
expiates the crime of atheistic wilfulness, the fatal pleas- 
ure of unbounded individual liberty, which rose up 
against the very nature of things. And other nations we 
know that expect all successes from the mere bHnd fury 
of willing, that declare the word impossible unknown to 
their language. They color their infatuation sometimes 
with the name of self-sacrifice, and fancy they can change 
the divine laws by offering up themselves as victims to 
their own vanity ; they " fling themselves against the bars 
of fate ; " they die in theatrical attitudes, and little know 
how '^ the abyss is wreathed in scorn " of such cheap 
martyrdom. 

A \vrong behef about God, however fatal it may be, is 
not atheism. Mr. Buckle tried to show that the Spanish 
empire fell through a false conception of the order of 
the Universe ; and it seems clear that the rigid Catholic 
view of the world is dangerous in this age to every 
nation that adopts it. These are the effects of false 
theology. But there is a state of mind which, though 
very far removed from the wilfulness I have been de- 
scribing, and often accompanied with a strong and 



ABUSE OF THE WORD '^ATHEISM." 29 

anxious religiousness, may nevertheless be practically re- 
garded as a form of atheism. It is the state of those 
minds which, fully beheving in an order of the Universe, 
yet have such a poor and paltry conception of it that 
they might almost as well have none at all. 

Men are sometimes led to this state by a very rea- 
sonable and excusable process of thought. Naturally 
modest and distrustful of their own powers, they despair 
of understanding the order of the Universe ; they do 
not presume to attempt to understand it. Wisely dis- 
trustful of any knowledge that is not precise, they avert 
their eyes instinctively from everything which cannot be 
made the subject of such knowledge. In all their trans- 
actions with Nature, to use my former phrase, they make 
it a rule to be unambitious. They aim at objects very 
definite and very near. Whatever they gain they make it 
a rule not to expose to any further risk. They avoid, as 
it were, meeting the Universe in front, and endeavor to 
overcome it in detail. For its immediate purpose this 
plan is the best that can be pursued. If in all our 
actions we allowed ourselves to remember the greatness 
of the power with which we have to do, we should 
accomplish nothing ; if because Nature's laws are large 
and comprehensive, we never acted except on the largest 
principles, we should either fall a prey to unsound gen- 
eralizations, the more ruinous because of their grandeur, 
or we should become paralyzed with a Turkish fatalism. 
Far better, no doubt, to make the utmost use of what 
precise knowledge we have, however little may be the 
amount of it, and not to suffer our minds to be be- 
wildered by coping too freely with an adversary whose 
play is beyond us. It is these humble, cautiously in- 



30 NATURAL RELIGION. 

ductive people that prosper most in the world up to a 
certain point. To them belong the large populations, 
the thriving communities, the stable politics. They 
never dream of defying Nature ; they win an. endless 
series of small victories over her. 

There is no reason why this cautiousness should neces- 
sarily degenerate into littlemindedness. It does not 
take its beginning in any deficiency of the feeling for what 
is great. On the contrary, it is the direct result of an 
overwhelming sense of the greatness and, so to speak, 
the dangerousness of Nature. Those who proceed thus 
warily, probing Nature as they go, may with most reason 
expect to penetrate far and to elevate their minds grad- 
ually until they can venture to cope with the grandeur of 
the world and become famihar with great ideas. And 
when this is done they will have escaped the danger 
of atheism. Their minds will become the mirror of an 
Infinite Being, and their whole natures will be conformed 
to His. But in the earher stages of such a process the 
temptation to a kind of atheism is strong. From the 
habit of leaving out of account all larger considerations 
in every problem, on the ground that they are vague and 
not precisely calculable, they are lead easily to forget the 
very existence of such considerations. The habit of 
never suffering the mind to dwell on anything great pro- 
duces often an atheism of the most pitiable and helpless 
kind. The soul of man lives upon the contemplation of 
laws or principles ; it is made to be constantly assimi- 
lating such sustenance from the Universe ; this is its food ; 
not by bread only, hit by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God doth man live. What then must be 
the moral starvation of the man who, from an excess of 



ABUSE OF THE WORD '^ATHEISM." 3 I 

caution, turns away from everything of the kind, until 
from want of habit he can no longer see such things ; and 
forgets their very existence ; so that for him there is no 
longer any glory in the universe? For all beauty or 
glory is but the presence of law ; and the universe to him 
has ceased to be a scene of law and has become an 
infinite litter of detail, a rubbish- heap of confused par- 
ticulars, a mere worry and weariness to the imagination. 
I have been describing the Philistine, the abject slave of 
details, who worships a humiliated, dissected, and abject 
deity, a mere Dagon, ^^ fallen flat upon the grundsel- 
edge, and shaming his worshippers." 

There is a particular extreme form of conventionalism 
which all men who observe it instinctively call by the 
name of atheism. Who has not said to himself, in read- 
ing the history of the French Revolution, that possibly 
the most genuine atheist where so many professed athe- 
ism may have been among the orthodox defenders of 
the old regime ? Of the Revolutionists we are disposed 
to say that surely they must have had some kind of be- 
lief, else whence came their energy? but among the 
crowd of Voltairian Abb^s we can fancy some in whom 
the conflict between inherited and imbibed ways of 
thinking may have destroyed belief and energy alike. 
Those who live in the decay of the Churches and systems 
of life are exposed to such a paralysis. They have 
been made all that they are by the system-; their mode 
of thought and feeling, their very morality has grown out 
of it. But at a given moment the system is struck with 
decay. It falls out of the current of hfe and thought. 
Then the faith which had long been genuine, even if 
mistaken, which had actually inspired vigorous action 



32 NATURAL RELIGION. 

and eloquent speech, begins to ebb. The vigor begins 
to be spasmodic, the eloquence to ring hollow, the loy- 
alty to have an air of hopeless self-sacrifice. Faith grad- 
ually passes into conventionalism. A later stage comes 
when the depression, the uneasiness, the misgivings, 
have augmented tenfold. It is then that in an individual 
here and there the moral paralysis sets in. In the ardor 
of conflict they have pushed into the foreground all the 
weakest parts of their creed, and have learnt the habit of 
asserting most vehemently just what they doubt most, 
because it is what is most denied. As their own belief 
ebbs away from them they are precluded from learning 
a new one, because they are too deeply pledged, have 
promised too much, asseverated too much, and involved 
too many others with themselves. Happy those in such 
a situation who either are not too clear-sighted or cling 
to a system not entirely corrupt ! There is an extreme 
case when what is upheld as divine has really become a 
source of moral evil, while the champion is one who 
cannot help seeing clearly. As he becomes reluctantly 
enlightened, as his advocacy grows first a little forced, 
then by degi*ees consciously hypocritical, until in the end 
he secretly confesses himself to be on the wrong side, — 
what a moral dissolution ! Henceforth he sees in the 
Universe nothing but a chaos. The law which once he 
fancied he discerned there, he can recognize no longer, 
and yet is forbidden by his situation from recognizing 
any other. The link that bound him to the Universe is 
snapped ; the motive that inspired his actions is gone, 
and his actions have become meaningless, mechanical, 
galvanic. He is an Atheist, without a God because 
without a law. Such men may often be noted among the 



ABUSE OF THE WORD "ATHEISM." 33 

most intelligent adherents of expiring causes, demoral- 
ized soldiers, powerless for good, though sometimes 
capable of mischief. 

These are specimens of what seems to be properly 
atheism. The common characteristic of all such states 
of mind is feebleness. In the first example you have 
violent feebleness, impotence ; in the second, cautious 
feebleness ; in the third, cynical feebleness ; but in all 
cases feebleness springing from a conscious want of any 
clue to the order of the Universe. These specimens are 
all such as may be furnished by men of great natural 
vigor. The cynical atheist has often an extreme subtlety 
of intellect, the Philistine comm.only begins with a great 
grasp of reality, a great superiority to illusions ; the 
wilful atheist has often much imagination and energy. 
Where a character wanting in energy is infected by 
atheism you have those afxeur^va Kaprjva of which the 
world is at all times full. By the side of the profound 
cynic you have the mere lounger, who can take an 
interest in nothing, all whose thoughts are hearsays, 
never verified, never realized, not beheved, not worthy 
of the name of prejudices — echoes of prejudices, imi- 
tations of hypocrisy. He moves about embarrassed 
and paralyzed by the hollowness of all he knows ; con- 
scious that nothing that he has in his mind would bear 
the smallest criticism or probation, knowing no way to 
anything better, and meanwhile ingenuously confessing 
his own inanity. By the side of the overjudicious 
Philistine, who has fallen into feebleness through an 
excessive dread of generalizing hastily, there may be 
seen the born Philistine, who does not know, and has 
never heard, what generalizing is, who becomes uncom- 

3 



34 NATURAL RELIGION. 

fortable when he hears a principle enunciated, as if he 
had been addressed by a foreigner in some language 
unkno\vn to him, and whose homely talk never willingly 
travels beyond what time the train starts, and whether 
it happened on Monday or on Tuesday. Lastly, by 
the side of the brilHant Utopian, who overlooks the 
greatness of the necessity with which he has to contend, 
there is the Utopian without brilliancy, the enrage, the 
mere restless disturber. 

As Atheism is but another name for feebleness, so 
the universal characteristic of Theology — if we put 
aside for the present the behef, rare till lately, in an 
utterly hostile or thwarting Deity — is energy. He 
who has a faith, we know well, is twice himself. The 
world, the conventional or temporary order of things, 
goes down before the weapons of faith, before the 
energy of those who have a glimpse, or only think they 
have a gHmpse, of the eternal or normal order of things. 
And this vigor of Theism does not much depend on 
the nature of the God in whom the theist beHeves. Just 
as Atheism does not consist in a bad theory of the Uni- 
verse, but in the want of any theory, so Theism con- 
sists not in possessing a meritorious or true or consoling 
theory, but simply in possessing a theory of the Uni- 
verse. He who has such a theory acts with confidence 
and decision, he who has no such theory is paralyzed. 
One of the rudest of all theories of the Universe is that 
propounded by Mohammed, yet it raised up a dispersed 
nation to vigor, union, and empire. Calvinism presents 
assuredly a view of the Universe which is not in any way 
consoling, yet this creed too has given vigor and hero- 
ism. The creed of the earliest Romans rested upon 



ABUSE OF THE WORD " ATHEISM. 



35 



no basis which could for a moment pass for philosophi- 
cal, yet while it was believed it gave order to the state, 
sanction to morality, victory to the armies. Whatever 
kind of Theology be in question, so long as it is truly 
believed, the only danger is of its inspiring too much 
energy, of its absorbing its votaries too much, and 
driving them into extreme courses. 

And so if the Nature recognized by Science be not 
benevolent, and have provided no future hfe for men, 
it does not follow that her votaries are not theologians, 
and it is quite clear that their theology gives them 
energy. Many theologies have admitted no future life 
— indeed our own, in its earlier Judaic form, laid no 
stress upon any future Hfe. And it is not the benevo- 
lence of his Deity which gives so much energy and 
confidence to the convinced Theist; it is rather the 
assurance that he has the secret of propitiating his 
Deity. It was not because Jupiter or Mars were benev- 
olent beings that the Roman went out to battle confiding 
in their protection. It was because all sacrifices had 
been performed which the Pontiifs or the Sibylline 
Books prescribed. Just of the same kind is the theistic 
vigor which we see in modern Science. Science also has 
lis procuratio prodigioru77t. It does not believe that Na- 
ture is benevolent, and yet it has all the confidence of 
Mohammedans or Crusaders. This is because it believes 
that it understands the laws of Nature, and that it knows 
how to deal so that Nature shall favor its operations. 
Not by the Sibylline Books, but by experiment, not by 
supplications but by scientific precautions and operations 
it discovers and propitiates the mind of its Deity. 

The advance of Science then is by no means equiva- 



36 NATURAL RELIGION. 

lent to the advance of Atheism. But what shall we say 
of that other advancing Power which terrifies religious 
men, and which calls itself the Revolution? The Rev- 
olution in Europe delights in declaring itself atheistic. 
So far as it is really so, by being Titanic, it is doomed 
to failure. But beyond this its invectives against God 
and against religion do not prove that it is atheistic, but 
only that it thinks itself so. And why does it think 
itself so? Because God and religion are identified in 
its view with the CathoHc Church, and the Catholic 
Church is a thing so very redoubtable that we need 
scarcely inquire why it is passionately hated and feared. 
But then the Catholic Church is 7iot really identical with 
Theism or even with Christianity. We cannot expect 
an angry party to draw these distinctions, but they are 
so plain that there remains nothing to discuss. There 
is plenty in the Catholic Church of what is oppressive 
and repugnant to the modern spirit, even if we make 
abstraction of all its Christianity. And when we hear 
the charges which the Revolution brings against it, such 
as affinity with despotism, with aristocratic privilege, 
with sacerdotahsm or with militarism, we see plainly 
that it is not hated even for its Christianity, much less 
for its theism. Christianity in its original character had 
an evident analogy with that modern liberal movement 
which assails Catholicism. It breathed something of 
the spirit of equality and still more of the spirit of 
fraternity ; it took its rise in a bold rebelhon against 
sacerdotal authority. But even if this were otherwise, 
it would remain true that the Revolution assails not 
theology itself but only a particular theology embodied 
in a particular institution. For another theology is quite 



I 



ABUSE OF THE WORD ^^ ATHEISM." 37 

conceivable which so far from thwarting the Revolution 
might embody all its aspirations. 

Equahty, brotherhood between classes and nations, — 
are these ideas so radically inconsistent with theology 
that they cannot be realized until theology has been 
swept away? So far from it that if we did not know 
historically by what process Cathohc theology became 
allied with caste and privilege so far as to compromise 
itself, we should have thought such an unnatural alliance 
scarcely possible. In France, theology was found on 
the side of privilege, but in the Moslem East the 
equality of mankind has been preached, and success- 
fully, in the name of theology. If a Christian preacher 
had been inspired to do so, he might with perfect 
warrant from his religion have proclaimed Equality in 
France. Indeed this was to some extent what actually 
happened. Rousseau spoke partly in the name of 
theology, and even of Christian theology ; one school 
among the revolutionists was fond of remarking the 
analogy between the revolutionary doctrine and early 
Christianity ; and it was not until the sceptical founda- 
tion had been in a manner abandoned, and an appeal 
made to religion, that the spirit of political change 
awoke. 

But the Revolution has also, no doubt, a quarrel with 
theology as a doctrine. " Theology," it says, '' even if not 
exactly opposed to social improvement, is a superstition, 
and as such allied to ignorance and conservatism. Grant- 
ing that its precepts are good, it enforces them by legends 
and fictitious stories which can only influence the unedu- 
cated, and therefore in order to preserve its influence it 
must needs oppose education. Nor are these stories a 



38 NATURAL RELIGION. 

mere excrescence of theology, but theology itself. For 
theology is neither more nor less than a doctrine of the 
supernatural. It proclaims a power behind nature which 
occasionally interferes with natural laws. It proclaims 
another world quite different from this in which w^e live, 
a world into which w^hat is called the soul is beheved to 
pass at death. It believes, in short, in a number of things 
which students of nature know nothing about and which 
science puts aside either with respect or with contempt. 
These supernatural doctrines are not merely a part of 
theology, still less separable from theology, but theology 
consists exclusively of them. Take away the supernatural 
Person, miracles, and the spiritual world, you take away 
theology at the same time, and nothing is left but simple 
Nature and simple Science." Thus theology comes to 
be used in the sense of supernaturalism, and in this view 
also excites the hostility of the age. Not merely scientific 
men themselves, for of these I am not now speaking, but 
Liberals in general, all those who have any tincture of 
science, all whose minds have in any degree taken the 
scientific stamp, a vast number already, and, as educa- 
tion spreads, likely to become co-extensive with civilized 
mankind, form a habit of thought with which they are 
led to consider theology irreconcilable. 

It is a singular coincidence which has combined in 
apparent opposition to theology the two mightiest forces 
of the present age, that is, the Revolution and Science. 
But it is only a coincidence, though ready theorists will 
never be content to see nothing more in it. They will 
not admit that theology has been undeservedly charged 
with all the sins of that ancient corporation called the 
Catholic Church, with which sins in reahty it had nothing 



ABUSE OF THE WORD ^'ATHEISM." 39 

whatever to do. It is much more interesting to imagine 
the Church as the body of which theology is the soul, 
and to trace all the body's actions to the natural dis- 
position of the informing soul. By this easy process we 
arrive at the conclusion that theology is an essentially 
conservative and stagnant principle, with the strongest 
natural affinity for despotism, privilege, respectability, 
and every kind of antiquated pretension, that, in short, 
it is a way of viewing the Universe which inevitably leads 
to all the vices peculiar to old endowed corporations. 
And that an institution which is opposed to the Revolu- 
tion should be at the same time at war with Science will 
never be thought a mere coincidence. Party-spirit will 
be adroit enough to make it out that Science and Revo- 
lution are as soul and body on the one side, as theology 
and conservatism are on the other ; that people who be- 
lieve in miracles must necessarily side with capital against 
labor, and that large standing armies follow logically from 
. a belief in benevolent design. 

As to the mistake which Hes in confounding theology 
with supernaturalism it is not necessary here to do more 
than repeat shortly what was said in the first chapter. 
First, then, there is no necessary connection between 
theology and supernaturalism. It is quite possible to 
believe in a God, and even a personal God, of whom 
Nature is the complete and only manifestation. Super- 
naturalism is part of the reigning theology, but it is not 
any necessary part of theology, as such. Secondly, when 
supernaturalism is said to be identical with theology, this 
is not true at all, even of the reigning theology. It is 
simply a mistake which has arisen from taking literally 
an abbreviated form of expression by which in contro- 



40 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



versy the controversialist is identified with the thesis he 
happens to be maintaining for the moment. He is said 
to fall when his thesis falls, though in reality he may 
remain as prosperous as ever. Thus Catholicism is 
identified in controversy with certain doctrines which 
Protestantism disputes, transubstantiation, worship of the 
Virgin, &c., and yet if these doctrines were to fall it is 
quite conceivable that the CathoUc Church, so far from 
falling, might flourish more than ever. In the same way, 
in controversy with science the reigning theology and 
supernaturalism are convertible terms. That is to say, 
if supernaturalism is refuted, science wins and the reign- 
ing theology loses In the particular controversy in which 
they are engaged. In the controversial sense this is the 
destruction of theology, but only in the controversial 
sense. For when the worship of God outside Nature 
is taken away the worship of God in Nature remains. 
Whether this residue is important or unimportant will be 
considered later ; at any rate it is there ; and it would 
not be surprising if it should turn out more considerable 
than controversiaHsts believe, when we remember how 
habitual it is for controversialists to exaggerate their 
differences. 

At any rate, it is evident that the theology of the book 
of Job, of many of the Psalms, e.g., the 104th, of many 
passages in the Prophets, of many discourses of Christ, 
of many passages in the Epistles, would remain unaffected 
if Supernaturahsm were entirely abandoned. No more 
need be said at this stage. 

I conclude then that the prevalent opinion about the 
advance of atheism rests upon an abuse of the word 
''' atheism.'* The threatening alliance between Science 



ABUSE OF THE WORD "ATHEISM." 4I 

and the Revolution is not really directed in favor of 
atheism nor against theology. For the antagonist of 
Science is only supernaturalism and not theology as 
such, while Science itself has all the character of a the- 
ology, such as theologies were at the first, being capable 
of inspiring a fanatical zeal and bearing in its hand a 
budget of practical reforms ; and moreover the Deity it 
proclaims is not different from the Deity of Christians, 
but only a too much disregarded aspect of Him. As to 
the Revolution, its antagonist is not theology at all, nor 
even supernaturalism, except in a secondary degree. 
The Revolution is infuriated against an ancient cor- 
poration, the greatest by far of all corporate bodies ever 
known, on the ground that in addition to its formidable 
power it has something antiquated in its constitution, 
shelters many abuses, and has in the latest centuries 
made common cause with other declining institutions. 
This corporation happens to be the depositary of a the- 
ology partly supernaturalistic, but we can see plainly that 
had it been the depositary of modern science itself it 
would have excited just the same animosity, nay, prob- 
ably very much more, for in fact its creed in some 
aspects is in most remarkable agreement with the revo- 
lutionary creed itself. 

On the other hand, of atheism, that demoralizing 
palsy of human nature, which consists in the inability to 
discern in the Universe any law by which human life 
may be guided, there is in the present age less danger 
than ever, and it is daily made more and more impos- 
sible by science itself : of revolt against the Christian 
law of Fraternity, there is also less than ever in this age, 
and that redemption of the poor and that pacification of 



42 NATURAL RELIGION. 

nations which Christianity first suggested are more prom- 
inent than ever among the aspirations of mankind. At 
the same time the organization of the Church seems ill- 
adapted to the age, and seems to expose it to the greatest 
danger ; and, what is far more serious, the old elevating 
communion with God, which Christianity introduced, 
seems threatened by the new scientific theology, which 
while presenting to us deeper views than ever of His in- 
finite and awful greatness, and more fascinating views 
than ever of His eternal beauty and glory, denies for 
the present to Him that human tenderness, justice and 
benevolence which Christ taught us to see in Him. 



'THEOLOGY" AND "RELIGION. 



43 



' CHAPTER III. 

THE WORDS ^^ theology'' AND 

Instead of Atheism then, we find that the result of 
cancelling supernaturalism and submitting to Science is 
a theology in which all men, whether they consider it or 
not, do actually agi*ee — that which is concerned with God 
in Nature. I do not here raise the question of causes or 
laws ; let it be allowed that Nature is merely the collec- 
tive name of a number of co-existences and sequences, 
and that God is merely a synonym for Nature. Let all 
this be allowed, or let the contrary of this be allowed. 
Such controversies may be raised about the human as 
well as about the Divine Being. Some may consider the 
human body as the habitation of a soul distinct and 
separable from it; others may refuse to recognize any 
such distinction : some may maintain that man is merely 
the collective name for a number of processes : some may 
consider the human being as possessing a free will and 
as being independent of circumstances; others may 
regard him as the necessary product of a long series of 
physical influences. All these differences may be almost 
as important as they seem to the disputants who are 
occupied about them, but after all they do not affect 
the fact that the human being is there, and they do not 
prevent us from regarding him with strong feelings. The 



44 NATURAL RELIGION. 

same is true of the Divine Being. Whatever may be 
questioned, it is certain that we are in the presence of 
an Infinite and Eternal Being ; except through some of 
those pen-ersions which I described in the last chapter, 
we cannot help the awe and admiration ^nth which we 
contemplate Him ; we cannot help recognizing that our 
well-being depends on taking a right view of His nature. 

But if theology in a certain sense of the word would 
survive the disappearance of supernaturalism, how would 
it be with religion ? Are we to regard rehgion as identi- 
cal with theology, or are we to suppose that the popular 
instinct, which is keenly alive to all that affects rehgion, 
but at the same time pretty indifferent to the fate of 
theology, is right in drawing so broad a distinction be- 
tween them ? 

There are t\vo ways in which the mind apprehends any 
object, two sorts of knowledge which combine to make 
complete and satisfactory knowledge. The one may be 
called theoretic or scientific knowledge ; the other prac- 
tical, familiar, or imaginative knowledge. The greatest 
trial of human nature lies in the difficulty of reconciling 
these two kinds of knowledge, of preventing them from 
interfering with one another, of arranging satisfactory re- 
lations between them. In order of time the second kind 
of knowledge has the precedence, and avails itself of this 
advantage to delay and impede the arrival of the first 
kind. Before the stars, the winds, the trees and plants 
could be grasped scientifically and the laws which govern 
them ascertained, they had been grasped, and as it were 
appropriated, by the human mind experimentally and 
imaginatively. The latter kind of knowledge was in 
some respects better than the former. It was more inti- 



'^THEOLOGY ' AND "RELIGION." 45 

mate and realized, so that, as far as it was true, it was 
more available. For practical purposes, accurate scien- 
tific knowledge of a thing is seldom sufficient. To 
obtain complete practical command over it you must 
take possession of it with the imagination and feelings as 
well as the reason, and it will often happen that this 
imaginative knowledge, helped very slightly by scientific 
knowledge, carries a man practically further than a very 
perfect scientific knowledge by itself. Witness the in- 
stinctive, as we say, and unanalyzable skill sometimes pos- 
sessed by savages. Moreover, this kind of knowledge is 
more attractive and interesting, and so has a more power- 
ful modifying influence upon its possessor than the other 
kind, for the simple reason that it takes hold of the most 
plastic side of his nature. But just because it is so 
fascinating, and is at the same time not by itself trust- 
worthy, it has certain mischievous consequences when it 
comes, as it generally does, first. Then it fills the mind 
with prejudices, hasty misconceptions, which, seizing 
upon the imagination, are stereotyped in the form of super- 
stitions ; and these sometimes exercise by themselves a 
most pernicious influence, and in any case close the mind 
against the entrance of the sounder scientific knowledge. 
When this imaginative medley of observation and preju- 
dice has long had possession, Science arrives. There 
follows a contest between the two kinds of knowledge, in 
which the human being suffers much. Truth cannot in 
the long run be resisted, and so, after whatever defence, 
the fortress is carried and the phantom garrison of 
superstition is driven out. The mind passes now under 
a new set of impressions, and places itself in a new rela- 
tion to the Universe. Its victory over superstition has 



46 NATURAL RELIGION. 

been won by placing a careful restraint upon imagination 
and feeling. In order not to be misled by feeling, it 
has been forced artificially to deaden feeling ; lest the 
judgment should be overwhelmed by the impressiveness 
of the universe, it arms itself with callousness ; it turns 
away from Nature the sensitive side, and receives the 
shock upon the adamantine shield of the sceptical reason. 
In this way it substitutes one imperfect kind of knowledge 
for another. Before, it realized strongly, but scarcely ana- 
lyzed at all ; now, it analyzes most carefully, but ceases 
in return to reaHze. As the victory of the scientific spirit 
becomes more and more decided, there passes a deep 
shudder of discomfort through the whole world of those 
whose business is with realizing, and not with testing, 
knowledge. Religion is struck, first, because the whole 
work of realizing presupposes faith, and yet, as the test- 
ing process comes late, faith is almost always more or 
less premature. But poetry and art suffer in their turn. 
How full has modern poetry been of this complaint ! 
One poet laments that "Science withdraws the veil of 
enchantment from Nature;'* one exclaims that "there 
zuas an awful rainbow once in heaven," but that Science 
has destroyed it ; another declares that we " murder to 
dissect," that we should not be always seeking, but use 
" a wise passiveness '' in the presence of Nature ; another 
^' that Nature made undivine is now seen slavishly obeying 
the law of gravitation ; " another buries himself in past 
ages ^^when men could still hear from God heavenly 
truth in earthly speech, and did not rack their brains." 

And yet to complain of the march of the scientific 
spirit seems as idle as to complain of the law of gravi- 
tation itself. It cannot be prevented, even if we were 



"theology" and "religion." 47 

able to show that it ought to be prevented ; it cannot 
much be retarded, even though some danger might be 
saved by putting the drag upon the wheels of discovery. 
The ardor of investigation, the fanaticism of truth- 
worship, make men deaf to such prudential considera- 
tions, and they are seconded by all the ill-will that the 
reigning system has provoked during its long predomi- 
nance and by all the eager ambitions which the prospect 
of a revolutionary change awakens. But we may look 
forward to a time when this transition shall be over, and 
when a new reconciliation shall have taken place 
between the two sorts of knowledge. In that happier 
age true knowledge, scientific, not artificially human- 
ized, will reign without opposition, but the claims of 
Science once for all allowed, the mind will also ap- 
prehend the Universe imaginatively, realizing what it 
knows. 

That kind of imaginative eclipse which an object 
suffers when the shadow of science passes over it has 
obscured in turn the material universe and Man and 
God. Natural mythology has become almost incom- 
prehensible to us. The "fair humanities of old reli- 
gion," which found objects of love in trees and streams, 
and covered the celestial map with fantastic^ living 
shapes — all this has long ago disappeared. More 
recently Man has been subjected to the analyzing 
process. The mechanical laws which were traced in 
the physical world, it was long hoped, would never 
suffice to explain the human being ; he at least would 
remain always mysterious, spiritual, sacred. But now 
Man begins to reckon his own being among things more 
than half explained ; nerve-force, he thinks, is a sort of 



48 NATURAL RELIGION. 

electricity ; man differs greatly indeed, but not generi- 
cally, from the brutes. All this has, for the time at 
least, the effect of desecrating human nature. To the 
imagination human nature becomes a thing blurred and 
spoiled, not really because the new view of it is in itself 
degrading, but because the imagination had realized it 
otherwise, and cannot in any short time either part with 
the old realizing or perfect a new one. Lastly, science 
turns her smoked eye-glass upon God, deliberately 
diminishing the glory of what she looks at that she may 
distinguish better. Here too she sees mechanism where 
will, purpose, and love had been supposed before ; she 
drops the name God, and takes up the less awful name 
of Nature instead. 

This disenchantment more than any other has made 
us ask ourselves whether analysis is not a kind of sacri- 
lege, and perhaps not merely because in this instance 
it strikes the highest object, but for another reason. 
Science cannot easily destroy our feeling for human 
beings. We are in such close contact with our own 
kind, our imagination and affections take such fast hold 
of our fellowmen as to defy physiology. If it were 
otherwise we should want a word — Anaiithropism — 
to answer to Atheism. The thing is indeed sometimes 
to be seen, and alarm has lately been expressed in Ger- 
many at the havoc which devotion, probably too exclu- 
sive and ambitious, to physical science may make with 
the feelings. But hitherto the scientific disbehef in 
Humanity — for so it may be called — has been rare. 
As for the material universe, that indeed has long been 
almost completely desecrated, so that sympathy, com- 
munion with the forms of Nature, is pretty well confined 



" THEOLOGY AND " RELIGION. 



49 



to poets, and is generally supposed to be an amiable 
madness in them. But this evil had another origin. 
Not analysis but rather religion itself, and especially 
monasticism, is responsible for it. In the ages called 
"of faith" it was felt even more painfully than now, so 
that Chaucer complains of the preachings and bannings 
of "limitours and other holy freres," which according 
to him had banished the fairies from the land. Nature 
had been made not merely a dead thing, but a disgust- 
ing and hideous thing, by superstitions of imps, witches, 
and demons ; so much so that Goethe celebrates science 
as having actually restored Nature to the imagination 
and driven away the Walpurgis-nacht of the middle 
ages ; and, indeed, by turning attention upon the natu- 
ral world, and inducing many to become famiHar with 
its beauties, Science may have given back to the imagi- 
nation, in this department, as much as it has taken 
away. 

But the conception of God is so vast and elevated 
that the human mind easily sinks altogether below it. 
The task of realizing what is too great to be realized, 
of reaching with the imagination and growing with the 
affections to a reality almost too high for the one, and 
almost too awful for the other, is in itself exceptionally 
difficult. To do this, and yet at the same time care- 
fully to restrain the imagination and feelings as Science 
prescribes, is almost impossible ; yet those who perpet- 
ually study Nature, if they study in a healthy and natu- 
ral manner, will always in some sense feel the presence 
of God. The unity of what they study will sometimes 
come home to them and give a sense of awe and de- 
light, if not of love. But upon those who do not study 

4 



50 NATURAL RELIGION. 

Nature the advance of Science and the rumor of its 
discoveries can have no other effect than to root out of 
their minds the very conception of God. The nega- 
tive effect is not counterbalanced by any positive one. 
To their apprehensions, if the supernatural Person 
whose will holds the Universe together is taken away, 
the Universe falls at once to pieces. No other unity 
takes His place, and out of the human mind there 
perishes the most elevating thought, and out of human 
life the chief and principal sacredness. The remedy 
for this is to be found in the study of Nature becoming 
universal. Let all be made acquainted with natural 
laws ; let all form the habit of contemplating them, and 
atheism in its full sense will become a thing impossible, 
when no mind shall be altogether without the sense, at. 
once inspiring and sobering, of an eternal order. 

But these remarks on the difficulty of harmonizing 
the scientific with the imaginative knowledge of things, 
are by way of digression. Our business at present is 
with the fact that knowledge is of these two kinds, and 
that the complete or satisfactory knowledge of anything 
comes from combining them. When the object of 
knowledge is God, the first kind of knowledge is called 
theology, and the second may be called religion. By 
theology the nature of God is ascertained and false 
views of it eradicated from the understanding ; by re- 
ligion the truths thus obtained are turned over in the 
mind and assimilated by the imagination and the 
feelings. 

When it is said, as we hear it said so commonly now, 
that the knowledge of God is impossible to man, and 
therefore that theology is no true science, of course the 



'' THEOLOGY AND " RELIGION." 5 I 

word God is used in that peculiar sense of which I have 
spoken above. Nature every one admits that we know 
or may know ; but of any occult cause of phenomena, or 
of any supernatural being accomphshing his purpose 
through natural laws or suspending the course of them, 
it is denied that we can know anything. Nevertheless 
since every sort of theology agrees that the laws of nature 
are the laws of God, it is evident that in knowing Nature 
we do precisely to the same extent know God. Regarded 
in this way, we may say of God that so far from being 
beyond knowledge. He is the one object of knowledge, 
and that everything we can know, every proposition we 
can frame, relates to Him. 

It has long been customary, especially with the reli- 
gious party, to put aside this distinction as perfectly idle. 
" It is pantheism " they cry, ^^ and pantheism is practically 
not distinguishable from atheism. A distinction merely 
speculative has no concern with the most momentous of 
all practical controversies. Was it not the old maxim 
of theology that the knowledge of God was life and the 
ignorance of Him darkness and death ? Try and adapt 
this maxim to your Universe- God. It either loses its 
meaning altogether, or sinks into some frigid platitude 
to the effect that all knowledge is valuable, or that the 
more things you know the more dangers you will be in 
a condition to avoid." 

But here we are reminded of that coincidence between 
the language of theology and the language lately adopted 
by science which was our starting point. Scientific men 
do now tell us in the very language of theology that all 
hope, that all happiness lies in the knowledge of Nature, 
and by Nature they mean the Universe. Spontaneously, 



52 NATURAL RELIGION. 

and in the very act of opposing theology they create 
theology anew. For they show us that it is not neces- 
sary to look beyond Nature or beyond experience in 
order to find that unique Object of which theology 
speaks. They themselves have found Him in Nature 
itself, where the religious party tell us it is vain to look 
for Him. The conception of Nature or of the Universe 
has now acquired distinctness, so that the study of it 
may be compared with other studies and recommended 
as specially important. 

But how can the conception of the Universe have 
distinctness, since the Universe includes everything? 
How can the study of it be compared with other studies ? 

^' What is there, then, than can possibly be studied 
besides the Universe?" 

There is in the first place a would-be reflection of the 
Universe, which it is possible to study as if it were the 
Universe itself; that is, the multitude of traditional un- 
scientific opinions about the Universe. In one sense, 
these opinions are part of the Universe, and to study 
them from the historic point of view is to study the 
Universe ; but when they are accepted and studied as a 
trustworthy counterpart, as they are by all the votaries of 
authority or tradition, then they may be regarded as a 
spurious Universe outside the real one, and such students 
of opinion may be said to study and yet not to study the 
Universe. 

This spurious Universe is almost as great as the genuine 
one. There are many profoundly learned men whose 
thoughts are solely occupied with it and have no concern 
whatever with reahty. The simplest peasant who from 
living much in the open air has found for himself, uncon- 



^^theology" and "religion." 53 

sciously, some rules to guide him in divining the weather, 
knows something about the real Universe ; but an inde- 
fatigable student who has stored a prodigious memory 
with what the schoolmen have thought, what the philoso- 
phers have thought, what the Fathers have thought, may 
yet have no real knowledge ; he may have been busy 
only with the reflected Universe. Not that the thoughts 
of dead thinkers stored up in books are not part of the 
Universe as much as wind and rain ; not that they may 
not repay study quite as well ; they are deposits of the 
human mind, and by studying them much may be dis- 
covered about the human mind, the ways of its operation, 
the stages of its development. As a reflection too, im- 
perfect yet not wholly unfaithful, of the Universe they 
may tell much about it. But they become a spurious 
Universe, and the knowledge of them becomes a false 
knowledge, when they are studied for themselves only 
or are confounded with the true Universe. Those who 
confound commentatorship with philosophy and mis- 
take erudition for science, may be said to study, but not 
to study the Universe. 

There are other classes of men of whom much the 
same may be said. The scientific school, when they 
recommend the study of Nature, do not mean, for 
example, the mere collecting of facts however au- 
thentic. Nature with them is not a heap of phe- 
nomena, but laws discerned in phenomena, and by a 
knowledge of Nature they mean a just conception of 
laws much more than an ample store of information 
about phenomena. Again, in an age like the present, 
when methods of inquiry have been laid dowti arfd tested 
by large experience, they do not dignify with the name 



54 NATURAL RELIGION. 

of the study of Nature any investigation, however earnest 
or fresh, of the facts of the world, which does not con- 
form to these methods, or show reason for not doing so. 

Knowledge of Nature understood in this sense, and 
obtained in this manner, is now recommended as the 
only true wisdom. And assuredly it deser\^es to be 
called in the strictest sense Theology. If God be the 
Ruler of the world, as the orthodox theology teaches, the 
laws of Nature are the laws by which He rules it. If you 
prefer the Pantheistic view, they are the very manifesta- 
tions of the Divine Nature. In any case the knowledge 
of Nature, if only it be properly sifted from the corrupt- 
ing mixture of mere opinion, is the knowledge of God. 
That there may be another and deeper knowledge of God 
beyond it does not affect this fact. 

All this is said in answer to the religious party which 
denies that there is any practical difference between pan- 
theism (for so they call the doctrine of a God revealed in 
Nature) and atheism. It is an answer which may seem 
to treat theology as a mere synonym for science. 

But we may distinguish a particular aspect of science 
which more than other aspects deserves to be called 
theological. 

Considered in its practical bearings upon human life, 
the study of Nature resolves itself into the study of two 
things, a force within the human being, and a necessity 
without him. Life, in short, is like a mechanical prob- 
lem, in which a power is required to be so advan- 
tageously applied as to overcome a weight which- is 
greater than itself. The power is the human will, the 
weight is Nature, the motive of the struggle between 
them is certain ideals which man instinctively puts 



** theology" and '* religion.' 55 

before himself — an ideal of happiness, or an ideal of 
perfection. By means of Science he is enabled to apply 
the power in the most advantageous manner. Every 
piece of knowledge he acquires helps him in his under- 
taking. Every special science which he perfects removes 
a new set of obstacles, procures him a new set of re- 
sources. And in his conflict with natural difficulties his 
energy and hope are in proportion to his power of 
measuring the force he has, and the resistance he will 
meet with. When he is able to measure this precisely, 
his hope becomes confidence, even in circumstances 
which might seem the most alarming. We allow our- 
selves to be hurried through the air at the rate of fifty 
miles an hour, with a noise and impetus appalling to a 
bystander, and all the while read or sleep comfortably. 
Why? Because the forces we have set in motion are all 
accurately measured, the obstacles to be met fully known. 
When the measurement is only approximate, there is not 
confidence, but only hope predominating over fear. The 
experienced sailor feels this ; he trusts himself to the 
perils of the sea, because he knows that he is pretty well 
matched against the necessity he provokes, though he 
cannot know that he is the superior, because he can 
calculate a good many of the dangers, though not all. 

Thus it is in each of the separate undertakings that 
make up life. To each of them belongs its appropriate 
knowledge, upon which our equanimity and repose of 
mind, as far as the particular undertaking is concerned, 
depend. But life itself, taken as a whole, is an under- 
taking. Life itself has its objects which make it interest- 
ing to us, which lead us to bear the burden of it. These 
objects, like those minor ones, are only to be attained by 



56 NATURAL RELIGION. 

a Struggle between the power Will and the weight Nature, 
and in this struggle also both success and the hope of 
success depend upon a certain knowledge which may 
enable us to apply the power with advantage. But the 
knowledge required in this case is of a more general 
kind; it is not a knowledge confined to certain sets 
of phenomena, and giving us a power correspondingly 
limited, but it is a general knowledge of the relation in 
which human Hfe stands to the Universe, and of the 
means by which life may be brought into the most satis- 
factory adaptation to it. Now, by what name shall we 
call this knowledge? 

Every one has his general views of human life, which 
are more or less distinct. Upon these general views more 
than upon anything else connected with the understand- 
ing moral character depends. For though theoretically 
morality may be independent of all such views, practi- 
cally and in the long run it varies with them. '^ What has 
life to give? How far does it lend itself to our ideals?'* 
These questions lie outside moral philosophy, and yet 
they are as vital to morality as any that lie within it. 
They are also quite as important to human happiness as 
all particular measures contrived to increase human hap- 
piness. No man fights with any heart if he thinks he has 
Nature against him. He who believes that men are not 
made to be happy, will lose the energy to do even what 
can be done for their happiness ; he who meets with 
more than a certain degree of discouragement in the 
pursuit of virtue, will give it up. 

Of an unfavorable view of human life there are three 
principal consequences — crime, languor, and suicide. 
The majority of crimes, and still more of meannesses, 



" THEOLOGY '^ AND ^^ RELIGION." 



57 



perhaps, are not committed from bad intentions, but from 
a despair of human hfe. " I am sorry, but I must do it ; 
I am driven to it ; everybody has to do it ; we must look 
at things as they are ; " these are the reflections which 
lead men into violations of moraHty. The feeling that 
life will not always allow us to do what is right, faint 
perhaps in each individual mind, grows strong when 
many who share it come together ; it grows stronger by 
being uttered, stronger still by being acted upon; it 
creates an atmosphere of laxity ; morality retires more 
and more out of view ; until the thought of crime itself, 
and even of enormous crime, becomes familiar, and at 
last is carried almost unconsciously into act. It is not, 
then, from want of morality that men do wrong, but 
from want of another sort of knowledge. They know 
what is right and what is wrong ; it is not from overlook- 
ing this distinction that they fall into the wrong, nor 
would they escape the danger by reflecting upon it ever 
so much. What determines their action is a belief in 
some sort of necessity, some fatality with which it is vain 
to struggle ; it is a general view of human life as unfavor- 
able to ideals. 

Another such general view of human hfe produces 
apathy. A man who has persuaded himself that we are 
the creatures of circumstance, or that we are the victims 
of a necessity with which it is impossible for us to cope, 
will give up the battle with Nature and do nothing. Per- 
haps he has his head full of instances of the best en- 
deavors after improvement failing entirely, or by some 
fatality producing extreme unhappiness ; of the purest 
and noblest labors causing mischief which complete inac- 
tivity would have avoided ; how Queen Isabella intro- 



58 NATURAL RELIGION. 

duced the Inquisition ; how Las Casas initiated the slave 
trade ; how pauperism has been over and over again fos- 
tered by philanthropy ; how the Prince of Peace himself, 
according to his own saying, brought a sword upon the 
earth. He may think that human life, as it runs on 
naturally, is not a bad thing, but that all attempts to con- 
trol it or improve it are hopeless ; that all high ideals are 
merely ambitious ; that purpose and, still more, system 
and all sophistication of life are mischievous. And so he 
may come to renounce all free-will, he may yield to the 
current of ordinary affairs, and become a mere conven- 
tionalist, accommodating himself to whatever he does 
not like, and learning gradually to tolerate with complete 
indifference the most enormous evils. Against such a 
perversion of mind morality is no defence ; what is 
needed is not a new view of what ought to be — such. a 
man knows well enough what ought to be — but a new 
view of what can or may be, a more encouraging view of 
the Universe. 

Sometimes the despair of human life goes to a much 
greater length. Life is a game at which we are not 
forced to play ; we may at any time throw up the cards. 
That only a few do so proves that more or less con- 
sciously most of us have a general view of life not alto- 
gether unfavorable. We are for the most part hardly 
aware of this general view, because it is always the same. 
We should become painfully aware of it if it were sud- 
denly to change. There is, as it were, a suicide-mark 
below which our philosophy is always liable to sink. If 
we came to think Hfe irreconcilably opposed to our 
ideals, and at the same time were enthusiastically de- 
voted to them, life would become intolerable to us. If 



^'theology" and *^ religion." 59 

our sense of the misery or emptiness of life became for 
some reason much more keen than it is, life would at 
last become intolerable to us. Individuals are con- 
stantly travelling by both roads to this goal, and there 
is no reason why whole societies or nations should not 
in like manner cease to think life valuable. Something 
of the kind happened with the Stoics of the imperial 
period. Their philosophy was only just above suicide- 
mark, and was continually dropping below it. In Asia 
the same is true of whole populations, with whom the 
value of hfe has sunk to the very lowest point. 

Of all these classes of men we say justly that they 
want faith. Their criminality or languor or despair are 
the consequences of their having no faith. But we 
sometimes express the same thing differently, and say 
that they have no God, no theology. With our Chris- 
tian habit of connecting God with goodness and love, 
we confuse together the notions of a theology and a 
faith. Let us reflect that it is quite possible to have 
a theology without having a faith. We may believe in a 
God, but a God unfavorable, hostile, or indifferent to us. 
In the same way we may believe in a God neither 
altogether friendly nor altogether the reverse. Many 
Pagan theologies were of this kind, and even many 
Christian sects, while nominally holding the perfect 
benevolence of God, have practically worshipped a 
Being who in this respect did not differ from the 
Pagan deities. 

It would be legitimate to call such general views of 
the relation of Nature to our ideals by the name of 
theology in all cases, and not merely those particular 
general views which are encouraging. If we believe 



60 NATURAL RELIGION. 

that Nature helps us in our strivings, we have both a 
theology and a faith ; if we beheve that Nature is in- 
different to us or hostile to us, we have no faith, but we 
have still a theolog}^, for we have still a definite notion 
of God's dealings with us. And this use of the word is 
not only justified by its etymology ; it is much more 
conformable to actual usage. To identify theology with 
the doctrine of the supernatural is, as I have pointed 
out, to narrow the meaning of the word unnaturally, 
and to appropriate it to a particular part of a particular 
theological system. A deception is produced by giving 
this technical sense to a word which in the common 
understanding has a much larger meaning. When those 
who reject the supernatural declare theology to be ex- 
ploded, they are commonly understood to mean that a 
vast mass of doctrine, pardy moral, partly historical, 
partly physical, in which the supernatural is mixed up, 
is exploded, whereas all they really say is that just that 
part is exploded which is supported only by the evidence 
of the supernatural. In like manner it is but a small 
part of what is commonly understood by theology that 
has to do with final causes, and yet those who consider 
final causes not objects of knowledge are fond of draw- 
ing the inference that all theological systems must be 
systems of spurious knowledge. Sometimes this juggle 
which is practised with the word theology becomes gro- 
tesquely apparent, and a sceptic will tell us in the same 
breath that theology deals with matters entirely beyond 
the range of human intellect, and that theology has been 
refuted by the discoveries of modern science ! 

The questions which we all understand to be theologi- 
cal are such as these : Is there a reward for virtue ? Is 



^^ theology" and ^^ religion." 6 1 

there a compensation for undeserved misery? Is there 
a sure retribution for crime? Is there hope that the 
vicious man may become virtuous? Are there means 
by which the pressure upon the conscience produced by 
wrong-doing may be removed? Are there means by 
which the mind disposed to virtue may defend itself 
from temptation? " In one word, is Hfe worth having, 
and the Universe a habitable place for one in whom 
the sense of duty has been awakened ? These questions 
are answered in different ways by different men. But 
they are answ^ered in some way by all men, even by 
those who consider themselves to have no theology at 
all. Christianity is the system which answers them in 
the most encouraging way. It says that virtue in the 
long run will be happy partly in this life, but much 
more in a life beyond the grave. It says that misery is 
partly the punishment of crime, partly the probation of 
virtue ; but in the inexhaustible future which belongs 
to each individual man, there are equivalents and over- 
payments for all that part of it which is undeserved. 
It says that virtue, when tried, may count upon help, 
secret refreshings that come in answer to prayer — 
friends providentially sent, perhaps guardian angels. 
It says that souls entangled in wrong-doing may raise 
themselves out of it by a mystic union with Christ, and 
burdened consciences be reheved by sharing in the 
infinite merit of His self-sacrifice. If you ask on what 
so happy and inspiring a belief rests, the evidence pro- 
duced is in part supernatural. 

This is not only a theology but a faith, the most 
triumphant of all faiths. But those who do not heartily 
share it, or who consciously reject it, yet give some 



62 . NATUK^L RELIGION. 

answer to these questions. They have a theology as 
much as Christians ; they must even have a faith of 
some sort, otherwise they would renounce human Hfe. 
It may be stated perhaps much as follows : 

'^ We have not much reason to beheve in any future 
state. We are content to look at human Hfe as it lies 
visibly before us. Surveying it so, we find that it is 
indeed very different from what we could wish it to be. 
It is full of failures and miseries. Multitudes die with- 
out knowing any tiling that can be called happiness, 
while almost all know too well w^hat is meant by misery. 
The pains that men endure are frightfully intense, their 
enjoyments for the most part moderate. They are 
seldom aware of happiness while it is present, so very 
delicate a thing is it. When it is past they recognize for 
the first time, or perhaps fancy, that it was present. If 
we could measure all the happiness there is in the 
world, we should perhaps be rather pained than glad- 
dened by discovering the amount of it ; if we could 
measure all the misery we should be appalled beyond 
description. When from happiness we pass to the 
moral ideal, again we find the w^orld disappointing. It 
is not a sacred place any more than it is a happy place. 
Vice and crime very frequently prosper in it. i Some of 
the worst of men are objects of enthusiastic admiration 
and emulation; Some of the best have been hated 
and persecuted.} Much virtue passes away entirely 
unacknowledged ; much flagrant h}^ocrisy escapes 
detection.; 

^' Still on the whole we find life worth having. The 
misery we find ourselves able to forget, or callously live 
through. It is but not thinking, which is always easy, 



*^ theology" and ^^ religion." 63 

and we become insensible to whatever evil does not 
affect ourselves. And though the happiness is not 
great, the variety is. Life is interesting, if not happy. 
Moreover in spite of all the injustice of destiny, all the 
inequahty with which fortune is meted out, yet it may 
be discerned that, at least in the more fortunate socie- 
ties, justice is the rule and injustice the exception. 
There are laws by which definite crimes are punished, 
there is a force of opinion which reaches vaguer of- 
fences and visits even the disposition to vice with a 
certain penalty. Virtue seldom goes without some 
reward, however inadequate ; if it is not recognized 
generally or publicly, it finds here and there an admirer, 
it gathers round it a little circle of love ; when even this 
is wanting it often shows a strange power of rewarding 
itself. On the whole, we are sustained and reconciled 
to life by a certain feeling of hope, by a behef, resting 
upon real evidence, that things improve and better 
themselves around us." 

This is certainly a very different faith from Chris- 
tianity. Whether it deserves to be called a faith at all, 
whether it justifies men in living and in calling others 
into Hfe, may be doubted. But it is just as much a 
theology as Christianity. It deals with just the same 
questions and gives an answer to them, though a differ- 
ent answer. Both views, whatever may be professed, 
are views about God. Christianity regards God as a 
friend ; it says that He is Love. The other view re- 
gards Him as awful, distant, inhuman, yet not radically 
hostile. 

Of course such views of human life, while they 
remain thus vague and loose, have nothing scientific 



64 NATURAL RELfciON. 

about them. But if they ceased to be vague, if precision 
were given to them, we should have a science of the 
relation of the Universe to human ideals. Such a 
science is constructing itself fast. The more men 
come to know Nature and to feel confidence in their 
knowledge, the more eagerly they will consider what is 
the attitude of Nature towards human beings. This 
question is not one which is in any way removed from 
human knowledge, it is not one which it can be con- 
sidered morbid to betray curiosity about. Yet this is 
the question of theology. Not only is it the only ques- 
tion with which theology ought to be concerned ; it is 
the only question with which theology ever has been 
concerned. The theologies of the world are merely 
different attempts to answer it. If they have for the 
most part trespassed upon the ground of the supernatu- 
ral, this has not been because theology is necessarily 
concerned with the supernatural, but in some cases 
because the line between the natural and supernatural 
had not been clearly drawn, in some cases because it 
was honestly believed that supernatural occurrences had 
happened and could be authenticated, and that such 
occurrences were calculated to throw new light upon 
the relation of God to man. If this belief was a delu- 
sion, theology must learn to confine itself to Na-ture. 
It may have to alter its idea of God, it may have 
to regard Him with fear and cold awe as in' the days 
before the Gospel was published ; it may even cease 
to be a faith, and may become an incubus, — a scien- 
tific superstition. But theology will remain notwith- 
standing a perfectly legitimate study, one which, under 
that or under some other name, men will always pursue 



"theology'* and "religion.'* 65 

with an interest they can feel in no other, one which 
stands in a more intimate relation than any other to 
morality, and must always be taught in conjunction 
with morality. 

We arrive then at the conclusion that there is a natu- 
ral theology which inquires into the relation of the Uni- 
-verse to human ideals. But here we must beware of a 
common misconception. It is often said that when you 
substitute Nature for God you take a thing heartless and 
pitiless instead of love and goodness. Undoubtedly 
much less of love and goodness can be discovered in 
Nature than Christians see in God. But when it is said 
that there are no such qualities in Nature, that Nature 
consists of relentless and ruthless laws, that Nature 
knows nothing of forgiveness, and inexorably exacts the 
utmost penalty for every transgression, a confusion is 
made between two different meanings which may be 
given to the word Nature. We are concerned here 
with Nature as opposed to that which is above Nature, 
not with Nature as opposed to man. We use it as a 
name comprehending all the uniform laws of the Uni- 
verse as known in our experience, and excluding such 
laws as are inferred from experiences so exceptional 
and isolated as to be difficult of verification. In this 
sense Nature is not heartless or unrelenting ; to say so 
would be equivalent to saying that pity and forgiveness 
are in all cases supernatural. It may be true that the 
law of gravitation is quite pitiless, that it will destroy the 
most innocent and amiable person with as little hesita- 
tion as the wrong-doer/' ' But there are other laws 
which are not pitiless. ' There are laws under which 
human beings form themselves into communities, and 

5 



66 NATURAL RELIGION. 

set up courts in which the claims of individuals are 
weighed with careful skill. There are laws under which 
churches and philanthropical societies are formed, under 
which misery is sought out and relieved and every evil 
that can be discovered in the world is redressed. Na- 
ture, in the sense in which we are now using the word, 
includes humanity, and therefore, so far from being 
pitiless, includes all the pity that belongs to the whole 
human family, and all the pity that they have accumu- 
lated and, as it were, capitahzed in institutions, poHtical, 
social, and ecclesiastical, through countless generations. . 
If we abandoned our behef in the supernatural it 
would not be only inanimate Nature that would be left 
to us ; we should not give ourselves over, as it is often 
rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers 
— winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes and fire. 
The God we should believe in would not be a passion- 
less, utterly inhuman power. He would indeed be a 
God often neglecting us in our need, a God often deaf 
to prayers. Nature including Humanity would be our 
God. We should read His character not merely in the 
earthquake and fire, but also in the still small voice ; 
not merely in the destroying powers of the world, but, 
as Mohammed said, in the compassion that we feel for 
one another ; not merely in the storm that threatens the 
sailor with death, but in the hfeboat and the i, Grace 
Darling > that put out from shore to the rescue ; not 
merely in the intricate laws that confound our pru- 
dence, but in the science that penetrates them and the 
art which makes them subservient to our purposes ; not 
merely in the social evils that fill our towns with misery 
and cover our frontiers with war, but in the St. Francis 



'^theology'* and ^^ religion." 67 

that makes himself the brother of the miserable, and in 
the Fox and Penn that proclaim principles of peace. 

Let us take one of the principal doctrines of the super- 
natural theology, and observe how it is modified by the 
rejection of supernaturaHsm. The eternal happiness re- 
served for the just is one of these doctrines. No natural 
evidence can establish it, nor even the future life involved 
in it. Even when the Psalmist, speaking merely of the 
present life, wrote, " I have been young, and now am old, 
and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed 
begging their bread," he perhaps thought of supernatural 
interpositions by which evil was averted from the just 
man. Suppose now that we repudiate all such behefs, 
and confine ourselves strictly to the facts of nature as we 
discover them from uniform experience. Let us suppose 
that the ordinary laws of Nature govern the lot of the 
just man, and that no exemptions are made in his favor. 
Do we find that these ordinary laws take no account of 
his justice, and that his prospects are in no respect 
different from those of the unjust man? Is Nature, as 
distinguished from the supernatural, regardless of the 
distinction between virtue and vice ? No doubt Nature 
is not a perfectly just judge. The just man has mis- 
fortunes like the unjust ; he may suffer from accident or 
disease. His justice may be denied ; he may suffer the 
penalties of injustice. All this may happen in particular 
cases, and yet no one doubts that on the whole the just 
man reaps a reward for his justice. A very simple law 
operates to reward him. By his justice he benefits the 
community, and the community, partly out of gratitude, 
partly out of an interested calculation, repay him for the 
service he has done. This law fails of its effect in a 



68 NATURAL RELIGION. 

good number of cases, but in the majority of cases it 
does not fail. And when it fails, it seldom fails alto- 
gether. There is generally some reward for justice, if 
not always an adequate reward. Accordingly, not only 
Christians, or those who believe in something more than 
Nature, but those whose only God is Nature, and even 
those whose knowledge of Nature is very superficial, fully 
recognize that virtue is rewarded. '' Honesty is the best 
policy " has become a proverb, and hypocrites have come 
into existence hoping to secure the reward without de- 
serving it. We see, then, that those who believe in 
Nature only may be said to believe not only in a God, 
but, in some sense, in a personal God. Their God, at 
least, has so much of personality that He takes account 
of the distinction of virtue and vice, that He punishes 
crime, and that He relieves distress. 

^^ It is quite true," says Maudsley, writing purely as a 
physiologist, '' that the just man is supported by ever- 
lasting arms." 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 69 



CHAPTER IV. 

THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 

As theology is to be distinguished from religion, a 
great dominant system such as Christianity, which is 
both a theology and a religion, has naturally two distinct 
classes of opponents. Hitherto I have spoken of those 
who oppose it as it is a theology, that is, the scientific 
school, and incidentally I have referred to the Revolution 
(which sees in Christianity properly neither a theology 
nor a religion, but a great social and political organiza- 
tion), in order to show how purely casual is its coalition 
with Science. It remains to consider the opposition 
which is made to Christianity as it is a religion. 

The scientific school, as such, contents itself with criti- 
cism and snakes no affirmation in respect of religion. 
Individual members of it in many cases look forward to 
nothing but the downfall of religion. Wholly distinct 
from this school is the party which, while it rejects Chris- 
tianity, proclaims religion to be the highest of all things 
and looks forward to a great renewal of its influence. 
But again we find this party divided within itself as soon 
as we inquire what the religion is which they regard as 
destined to replace Christianity. One section says that 
Humanity will be in future the object of worship, but 
meanwhile for many generations past a long line of in- 



70 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



sinuators have been repeating under their breath that the 
time would come when Pantheism would prevail, when 
the supernatural tyrant of the Universe would give way 
to the Universe itself. There are further differences of 
opinion as to the form which this Pantheism will take, 
and often it may be obser\-ed that the purer sweeter wor- 
ship which is promised to us is pictured as a revival of 
Greek Paganism. 

I have tried to show that what is commonly called 
Atheism may be less shocking, because less atheistic, 
than it seems. In like manner the new experiments 
in worship may be less subversive of the old worship 
than they seem to be. That we ought to worship Man, 
that St. Paul at Athens assailed true and not false dei- 
ties, are propositions which may after all convey noth- 
ing so impious. The words religion and worship are 
commonly and conveniently appropriated to the feel- 
ings \\'ith which we regard God. But those feelings — 
love, awe, admiration, which together make up worship 
— are felt in various combinations for human beings, 
and even for inanimate objects. It is not exclusively 
\yviX OT^j par excelle7ice that religion is directed towards 
God. When feelings of admiration are very strong they 
find vent in some act ; when they are strong and at the 
same time serious and permanent, they express them- 
selves in recurring acts, and hence arises ritual, liturgy, 
and whatever the multitude identifies with religion. But 
without ritual, religion may exist in its elementary state, 
and this elementary state of religion is what may be 
described as habitual a7id pei'maiieiit admiration. 

Now it is surely not to be supposed that every higher 
form of religion ought to supersede and drive out the 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 7 1 

lower forms. Difficult no doubt it is to restrain religious 
feeling from such intolerance. Religious feeling in its 
exaltation delights to repeat that worship paid to any 
but the highest object is sin and is apostasy. But this 
is a way of speaking which involves a somewhat arbi- 
trary restriction upon the meaning of the word worship. 
Feelings of admiration and devotion are of various de- 
grees, and are excited by various objects. Such feehngs 
may be called by the general name of worship, and we 
may be said, without offence, to regard an official as 
worshipful, to worship a wife, to worship heroes. But 
the same word may also be used in a special and tech- 
nical sense to denote the particular sort of devotion 
paid to the highest object we recognize, and it is in this 
sense alone that the word is used when religion forbids 
worship to be paid to whatever is in any degree worshipful. 
Churches however are often intolerant in pushing this 
way of speaking beyond bounds. The greatest rehgious 
revolution in history is, in the main, simply a reaction 
against such intolerance, when the right of ideal human- 
ity to receive worship was asserted in the heart of a 
people devoted to the exclusive worship of Deity. And 
in modern history there are many evidences of a reac- 
tion secretly in progress against the absorption of that 
earlier and lower form of religion which may be called 
physical by the higher forms. Paganism itself, many 
think — and why should it not be true ? — was too in- 
tolerantly put down. Even if the intolerance of a 
necessary and beneficent revolution is pardonable, that 
is no reason why it should not be repaired in later and 
quieter times. The horror of physical nature which 
marked the middle ages has passed away from the mod- 



*]2 NATURAL RELIGION. 

ern mind; the iconoclasm which raged against Greek 
art and heathen learning is no more necessary to Chris- 
tianity than the hatred of painted windows is to Protest- 
antism. The worship of natural forms has gradually 
revived. They now receive a secondary and inferior 
sort of homage, and so much in this respect has the 
world advanced that there is little danger of any worship 
we may pay to natural beauty blunting our sense of the 
higher reverence due to moral goodness. 

It thus appears that, as usual, the vague horror with 
which the religious world hears of the worship of Hu- 
manity or of a sort of revival of Paganism has been 
partly caused by the double meaning of a word. The 
worship of Humanity, it is plain, belongs to the very 
essence of Christianity itself, and only becomes heretical 
in the modern system by being separated from the wor- 
ship of Deity. As to the worship of natural forms, ver- 
bally no doubt nothing can be more plainly opposed 
both to Judaism and Christianity. It is even true that 
not merely the excess of it or the substitution of it for 
a higher worship, but the worship itself in all forms, is 
denounced in the Jewish Scriptures. But to those who 
take the free historical view of Hebrew prophecy it is 
not difficult at the same time to revere its denuncia- 
tions of idolatry, and to sympathize warmly with Greek 
nature-worship. For it is easy to understand that nature- 
worship as a practical system known to the Hebrews 
might be degrading and pernicious, and yet that in 
itself it might contain some healthy elements which in 
exceptional conditions beyond the observation of He- 
brew prophecy might take a beautiful development, and 
become a necessary part of the .religion of mankind. 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 73 

We might without difficulty adopt the idea of a sort of 
Higher Paganism. Still more readily might Christians 
reconcile themselves to the worship of Humanity. That 
which may reasonably excite alarm in these new systems 
is not their affirmations but their negations, not the new 
worships in themselves but the repudiation of the ancient 
worship of God. 

And thus we are led to ask in respect to the contro- 
versy between Christianity and these rival religions, the 
same question which we asked at the outset in respect 
to the dispute between Christianity and Science, Is the 
difference really as radical as it seems ? And again the 
same answer suggests itself, viz., that these rival schools 
of religion also have identified Christianity and Theism 
far too much with the doctrine of the Supernatural. 
Both alike have inquired what religion would be pos- 
sible to man if he ceased to beheve in anything beyond 
Nature. They have agreed that all the Semitic religions 
would necessarily fall, but they have formed different 
notions of the religion which would take their place. 
One school has imagined a revival of the original Pagan- 
ism, which had something of the character of nature- 
worship. The other has held that one element of Chris- 
tianity would be disengaged from the Christian system 
to become the germ of a new religion, while all of Chris- 
tianity that has to do with Deity would perish. 

But however a certain modified Paganism might seem 
in itself not inadmissible, it is a mere vague literary fancy, 
which will bear no examination, to imagine this as taking 
the place of supernatural religion, if supernatural religion 
should fall. Nothing can be more untrue than that 
Natural Religion is identical with classical Paganism, and 



74 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



that to adopt it would be to revive the " golden years " 
Shelley sings of, to substitute a Madre Natura for the 
Christian Church, and Pan or Apollo for Christ. This 
is the opposite misconception to that which pictures 
Nature as pitiless. Nature as opposed to the Supernat- 
ural is no more rustically innocent than it is pitiless. For 
as it is wholly different from Nature as opposed to Man 
so again' it is wholly different from that Nature which 
may be roughly said to be worshipped in classical Pagan- 
ism. When we consider that Greek Paganism is as full 
of supernatural personages and occurrences as the most 
superstitious forms of medieval Christianity, we may well 
wonder that such a mistake could be made. But as 
Greek Paganism is the only religion besides Christianity 
which has had any chance of taking hold of our imagina- 
tions, we cannot help reverting to it whenever the disap- 
pearance of Christianity is prophesied. Then as it is grace- 
ful, as we have never been frightened by it as we have 
been frightened by Christianity, and as it is called a natural 
religion, we conclude by an easy inadvertence that some- 
thing Hke it would revive if the supernatural religion 
which suppressed it should pass away. But it is a nat- 
ural religion in a wholly different sense, rather as not 
being moral than as not being supernatural. The fas- 
cination of the Fauns and Nymphs of Greek art, th-e be- 
witching gaiety of the Pagan hymn in the Adoniazusae, 
do not arise from the absence of the Supernatural — for 
the Supernatural is present — but from the absence of 
morality and self-consciousness, from a certain infancy 
of the mind which seems to have been lost in the prog- 
ress of civilization. 

It was not the invasion of a Semitic religion that put to 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 



75 



flight these bright visions, but the natural progress of 
human development, giving birth to reflection, philoso- 
phy, morality. And therefore no conceivable decay of 
Christianity could bring back a primitive way of think- 
ing which had been outgrown long before Christianity 
appeared. We may indeed, as I have said, admit a sort 
of Higher Paganism, that is, we may admit that there 
was an element in the Greek nature-worship which is 
imperishable. But we may be certain at the same time 
that the moral ideas which were never incorporated in 
Greek religion because Greek religion had been struck 
with decay before their appearance, those ideas of justice, 
duty, love, and self-sacrifice, many of which are em- 
bodied in Christianity, are not less imperishable and are 
of a higher rank. Nature, considered as the residuum 
which is left after the elimination of everything super- 
natural, comprehends man with all his thoughts and 
aspirations not less than the forms of the material world. 
Accordingly the natural religion of which we are in search 
will certainly include a religion of Humanity as well as a 
religion of material things. It will retain at least the 
kernel of Christianity, even if it rejects the shell. It 
will concern itself with questions of right and wrong, it 
will run the same risk as Christianity of falling into ex- 
cesses of introspection and asceticism. But along with 
this transfigured Christianity, only in a subordinate rank, 
it will include the Higher Paganism or in other words 
the purified worship of natural forms. 

The rejection of supernaturalism then is not equiva- 
lent to a rejection of Semitic for Hellenic religion. 
Rather we find both sorts of religion alike flourishing 
most freely in an atmosphere of supernaturalism, and 



^5 NATURAL RELIGION. 

both alike languishing at the breath of science, but also 
we find both sorts of religion acclimatizing themselves 
with an effort in the scientific atmosphere. The one 
sort may be more sensuous and the other more moral, 
but both alike admit of being rationalized. Sensuous 
religion was supernatural in Greece. The feelings ex- 
cited in the Greek by the sight of a tree or a fountain 
did not end where they began, in admiration, delight, and 
love ; they transformed the natural phenomenon into a 
marvellous quasi-human being. But the same feelings 
in the mind of Wordsworth produced a new religion of 
sense, and this was a natural religion. He worships 
trees and fountains and flowers for themselves and as 
they are ; if his imagination at times plays with them, 
he does not mistake the play for earnest. The daisy, 
after all, is a flower^ and it is as a flower that he likes 
best to worship it. '' Let good men feel the soul of 
Nature and see things as they are." In like manner moral 
religion has taken two forms. Christianity (from which 
we need not here separate Judaism) is to a certain extent 
a supernatural rehgion, but rationalistic forms of it have 
sprung up ; attempts have been made to disentangle the 
religious principle which is at the bottom of it from the 
supernatural element with which it is mixed. The re- 
ligion of Humanity which has been springing up in 
Europe since the middle of the last century seems the 
most comprehensive and the least artificial of these 
forms. 

Some such rationalized Christianity then, or religion 
of Humanity, we may conceive as surviving the fall of the 
supernatural system. And beside it, reconciled to it, we 
may imagine the sensuous Hellenic religion. But would 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 



n 



this be all? Is it so evident that all- which relates to 
Deity would pass away? Is there not something wholly 
independent of marvel or miracle in that idea of Unity, 
of Eternity ? May not this also take two forms accord- 
ing as it is associated with supernaturalism or divorced 
from it? Our innovators in religion seem scarcely to 
conceive the possibility of this. And no wonder, for if 
all religion loves miracle, the religion of God must do so 
in an especial manner. Our experience of a limited 
physical phenomenon may be some measure of its 
powers ; we may feel sure that we know the utmost it can 
do. But who can place any limits to Nature or to the 
Universe ? We may indeed require rigid proof of what- 
ever transcends our experience, but it is not only Orien- 
tals who say that ^^with God all things are possible ; '^ 
the most scientific men are the most willing to admit 
that our experience is no measure of Nature, and that it 
is mere ignorance to pronounce ^ /;76>r/ anything to be 
impossible. Accordingly those religions which have had 
for their object the Unity of the Universe, or what we call 
par excei/e7tce, God, as distinguished from gods many and 
lords many, have generally been most lavish of miracle. 
They have delighted to believe in whatever is most 
improbable, as best displaying the greatness of their 
Divinity. Credo quia impossibile is a paradox specially 
belonging to the religion of God. 

But does it follow, because miracles gather naturally 
round the idea of God, that the idea itself requires them 
and cannot dispense with them? Let us imagine all 
miracles exploded, and the word "miracle" itself, ex- 
cept in the sense of a phenomenon as yet unexplained, 
dismissed to the vocabulary of poetry. Would the 



78 NATUR-\L RELIGION. 

word ^^ miracle," thus passing out of serious use, carry 
\\-ith it the word '' God " ? 

Who does not call to mind those passages in the New 
Testament in which — so strangely to those whose faith 
rests on Paley's Evidences — the demand for miracles is 
treated with contempt ? Such passages show that even 
in a scheme of rehgion in which miracle plays a consid- 
erable part it is not regarded as the only mode of divine 
action, but rather as the sign of some important change 
in the mode of divine action, some new dispensation. 
They show that the great founders of Semitic rehgion 
worshipped rather the God who habitually maintains his 
laws than the God who occasionally suspends them. 

The question here proposed is not whether, if the 
evidence of miracles were exploded, there would still 
remain other grounds for beheving in a God beyond 
Nature and even in a God holding communication vnth 
us othenvise than through Nature. This has often been 
maintained, and demonstrations of various kinds, meta- 
physical, moral, and mystical, of the existence of such a 
God have been offered. But the present question relates 
not to any God who is beyond Nature, but to a God 
who is only Nature called by another name. And the 
question is whether any worship worth calHng worship 
can be offered to such a Deity. 

This form of religion is commonly called Pantheism, 
but it is seldom thought of seriously. By the orthodox 
it has been treated as the mere phantom of a religion, 
while the imiovators have preferred the speculation of a 
religion of humanit}'. Hence it has been left to a few 
poets, who, misled by the idylhc associations of the 
word Nature and the syllable Pa/?, have indulged in the 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 79 

irrelevant fancies criticised above. The God in Nature 
with whom we are here concerned is no rustic Pan. If 
there be, as we have held, a legitimate form of Paganism, 
it does not belong here. That is a religion of natural 
forms ; it is just the freshness of feeling with which the 
healthy mind admires and grows to the living things 
around it ; of all religions it is the easiest, simplest, most 
childlike. But this religion is in the other extreme ; 
it is austere, abstract, subHme. It worships, not the 
individual forms of Nature, but Nature itself considered 
as a unity. It may indeed be called out by the same 
objects, a tree or a flower, the sky or the sea. But 
in that case what it worships is as little as possible the 
object itself, for this religion looks through and beyond 
visible things as naturally as Paganism rests in them. 
The infant and the man of science may admire the same 
flower, but while the former babbles his Pagan hymn to 
the form and the color, the latter loses both in the 
law which he sees behind them, loses the individual in 
the kind, and the kind itself in the vista of higher unities 
above it. Or may we not illustrate the difference as well 
by contrasting the Hebrew poet's Psalm of Nature with 
Homer's descriptions. While the latter touches in turn 
the sea, the clouds, the wind, with some bright epithet 
that marks his enjoyment, the former instinctively col- 
lects them all under one grand unity — Who layeth the 
beams of his chambers in the waters, ivho maketh the 
clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the 
wind. 

This worship of the Unity in the Universe is to be 
found in most historic religions conjoined with other 
worships which are in some cases much more promi- 



80 NATURAL RELIGION. 

nent. The simplest form of it perhaps is Mohamme- 
danism, which not only contemplates a unity of the 
world, but seems almost indifferent to the phenomena 
themselves, the unity of which it contemplates. Ab- 
sorbed in the idea of the greatness of God it. loses its 
interest in the visible evidences of His greatness. But 
in most cases this religion of unity is combined with one 
or both of the other religions. The unity worshipped is 
not an abstract unity, but a unity either of the physical 
or of the moral world or of both. In Paganism the 
physical world is not worshipped simply for itself, but a 
feeble attempt is made to establish some unity among its 
phenomena by setting up a supreme Jove over the mul- 
titude of deities. In the moral religions the tendency to 
unity is still stronger. Judaism and Christianity are at 
once religions of humanity and religions of God, and the 
former at least is primarily a religion of God and only 
secondarily a religion of humanity. 

This worship is not less necessary than the others. 
When natural objects have had their due, when virtue 
and duty have been fully reverenced, is there not a further 
and greater object of reverence, whose existence we must 
recognize, even though we believe in nothing supernat- 
ural, even though we indulge in no subtle psychological 
analysis ? It is certain that the thought of a Supreme 
Being, which is so natural to man, is not excited only by 
occasional suspensions of law nor only by secret unac- 
countable monitions felt in the conscience. It is excited 
at least as much by law itself as by the suspension of 
law ; it is excited quite as much by looking around as 
by looking within. It is quite distinct also — this is no 
less certain — from the thought of ideal humanity. Lin- 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. gl 

naeus fell on his knees when he saw the gorse in blos- 
som ; Goethe, gazing from the Brocken, said, " Lord, 
what is man that thou art mindful of him? " Kant felt 
the same awe in looking at the starry heaven as in con- 
sidering the moral principle ; Wordsworth is inspired 
rather among mountains than among human beings ; in 
solitude Byron felt the rapture which ^^ purified from 
self." It is a paradox which will convince few that 
^* the heavens declare no glory but that of Kepler and 
of Newton." 

Who is there that is not conscious of a feeling of 
awe when he realizes the greatness of the Universe? 
When from thinking of this thing and that thing he rises 
to the thought of the sum and system of things ? 

But now it is an error to suppose that to identify this 
natural awe with the worship of God is necessarily Pan- 
theism. 

Pantheism asserts an immanent cause, the creed 
called orthodox, a transcendent one. But how does this 
difference, important as it may be in itself, affect the 
religious awe I speak of? That will remain the same, 
in whichever way we prefer to conceive the Universe. 
The two theories agree in this, that they give a unity, 
though a different kind of unity, to the Universe. Now 
religious feeling is excited by thinking of the Universe 
as a unity and not merely by the particular form in 
which we give it unity in our minds. 

Why should our feeling towards universal nature vary 
with our theories about it, any more than our feeling 
towards human nature? The Man, like the Universe, 
is a highly complex phenomenon, which we conceive as 
a unity. About the Man, as about the Universe, there 

6 



82 NATURAL RELIGION. 

are two theories. Has he a soul, which dwells in his 
body as an inmate until it is expelled by death ? Or is 
this but a hypothesis and a useless one? Few questions 
can be more important. Nevertheless, we do not find 
that those who reject the hypothesis are as if they did 
not beUeve in the human being at all. Their feelings 
towards the human being may be just as lively as if they 
believed him to have a separable soul. And there may 
be a third class of people who do not even raise the 
question, who have no opinion whatever on the contro- 
verted point, and whose feelings towards human beings 
may also be not less lively, or may even be more lively 
than those of either of the warring parties. 

It is, in fact, neither the separable soul of a man, nor 
yet the body of a man that excites our feelings of respect 
or dislike, friendship or enmity ; it is the man himself, 
in other words, it is the unity of all the organs compos- 
ing him, the single total to which we give that name. 
Not otherwise is it with the Universe. When we realize 
it as one we utter the name God, and in doing so we 
do not pledge ourselves to the doctrine that God is 
the Universe, nor yet to the doctrine that He is distinct 
from it. 

*' But why say God, if you merely mean Universe or 
World or Nature? Would it not be better to reserve 
the name God for the distinct, invisible, eternal Cause 
of the Universe which is supposed in most religions, 
which is denied in Pantheism, and put aside as an 
unverified hypothesis in Positivism? " 

This is indeed only a verbal question, for we do 
not alter the nature of the Object of our worship when 
we alter the name by which we describe it. Whatever 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 83 

feelings it legitimately excites will be excited as much 
under one name as under another. Still if a name can 
ever be important, the name by which we habitually 
indicate the Eternal Being will be so. Instinctively we 
attach so much sacredness to that name that we can 
scarcely bear that it should give place to another, even 
if another could be found more appropriate. It is the 
name God which has acquired everywhere this sacred- 
ness ; it is the name God to which poetry and religion 
cling, and certainly very strong reasons ought to be 
shown before we can be expected to tear that name 
from our hearts and replace it by some other hallowed 
as yet by no associations. 

Shall we abandon it for the term Universe? That 
expresses — not indeed etymologically but in usage — 
the total of things arrived at, as it were, by mere collec- 
tion or addition. But we are" thinking of the unity 
which all things compose in virtue of the universal 
presence of the same laws. The word World has also 
associations which render it ineligible. In the first 
place, it has been conveniently adopted to express the 
very opposite of what we want to express. The arti- 
ficial, conventional order which communities establish 
among themselves — an order unnatural, transitory, and 
tending to corruption — has been called World, and 
has been contrasted by poets with Nature and by theo- 
logians with God. Even when the word is used other- 
wise, and is a mere synonym for Universe, it still 
conveys rather the notion of a place in which we live, 
of an immense residence or house, than the notion of 
an infinite Being, with which we are connected as the 
part is connected with the whole, or as the member 
widi tlie body. 



84 NATURAL RELIGION. 

Moreover, it is to be observed that by using these 
words we seem to close the very question we wish to 
leave open ; for both seem adapted to express only the 
pantheistic view, both seem implicitly to deny the other 
view. It is as if we were to insist upon calHng the 
human being by the name Body. The opposite objec- 
tion cannot be made to the name God : it cannot be 
said that this name excludes the Pantheistic view. The 
etymology , of the word Pantheism is sufficient by 
itself to prove that it does not. Nor is it solely in con- 
nection with the theory opposite to Pantheism that the 
word God has gained its pecuHar sacredness and awful- 
ness. From the Bible itself it is easy to quote panthe- 
istic language — ^^ In whom we live and move and have 
our being." Both in Judaism and Christianity the word 
is used for the most part in the large indeterminate 
sense. Texts of Scripture may be quoted no doubt in 
support of either view, but on both sides alike they 
would be misquoted, for their language, as others have 
forcibly 'urged, is not scientific but practical, or — what 
on such subjects is the same thing — poetical. Many 
have found that they received a new revelation of the 
subhmity of the Bible when first they learnt to use the 
word '* God " in what may be called its natural sense. 

It is the word Nature which science, in its traditional 
aversion to theological language, most willingly adopts. 
There can be no objection to using it, and on most 
occasions one would choose it in preference to a word 
which, no doubt, is too sacred to be introduced un- 
necessarily — too sacred, in short, to be worked with. 
But it is well known to be one of the most ambiguous 
of words. Nature, as the word has hitherto been used 



THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 85 

by scientific men, excludes the whole domain of human 
feeling, will, and morahty. Nevertheless, in contem- 
plating the relation of the Universe to ourselves and to 
our destiny, or again in contemplating it as a subject of 
admiration and worship, the human side of the Universe 
is the more important side to us. Our destiny is 
affected by the society in which we live more than by 
the natural conditions which surround us, and the moral 
virtues are higher objects of worship than natural beauty 
and glory. Accordingly the word Nature suggests but 
a part, and the less important part, of the idea for which 
we are seeking an expression. Nature presents herself 
to us as a goddess of unweariable vigor and unclouded 
happiness, but without any trouble or any compunction 
in her eye, without a conscience or a heart. But God, 
as the word is used by ancient prophets and modern 
poets — God, if the word have not lost in our ears some 
of its meaning through the feebleness of the preachers 
who have undertaken to interpret it, conveys all this 
beauty and greatness and glory, and conveys besides 
whatever more awful forces stir within the human heart, 
whatever binds men in families, and orders them in 
states. He is the Inspirer of Kings, the Revealer of 
laws, the Reconciler of Nations, the Redeemer of labor, 
the Queller of tyrants, the Reformer of Churches, the 
Guide of the human race towards an unknown gpal. 



86 NATURAL RELIGION. 



CHAPTER V. 

NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 

" But what consolation is to be found in such a wor- 
ship? What is the use of beheving in such a God?" 
This is the objection that may be looked for. It is true 
that the conception of God in Nature, however evidently 
great, sublime, and glorious, is at the same time a painful 
and oppressive conception to us. The thought of the 
unity of the Universe is not felt by all to be inspiring ; 
the belief in it is not necessarily a faith. For we must 
look at the bad side of the Universe as well as the good. 
The Power we contemplate is the power of death as 
well as life, of decay as well as of vigor; in human 
affairs He is the power of reaction as well as of pro- 
gress, of barbarism as well as of civilization, of cor- 
ruption as well as of reform, of immobility as well 
as of movement, of the past as well as of the future. 
In one of the grandest hymns ever addressed to Him, 
this mixed feehng of terror and fascination with which 
we naturally regard Him is strongly marked : — *^ Thou 
turnest man to destruction ; again Thou sayest, Come 
again, ye children of men. For we consume away in 
Thine anger, and in Thy wrath we are troubled." Bear- 
ing this in mind, it has become a habit with us to 
say that God thus conceived is not God at all, and 
to treat belief in God as equivalent to a beUef in 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 8/ 

something beyond these appearances, something which 
gives the preponderance to good and makes the evil 
evanescent in comparison with it. If we cannot grasp 
this belief in something beyond, it is thought that what is 
visible on the face of the Universe is a mere nightmare. 
'' Call it God, if you will ; but it is a God upon whose 
face no man can look and live ; from such a God it is 
well to turn away our eyes. What is the use of such a 
God?'^ 

But meanwhile He is there. Though the heart ache 
to contemplate Him, He is there. Can we turn our 
eyes away from Him ? In which direction should we 
turn them? 

No doubt however many have found it possible to look 
upon the Universe and see no such Being. They have 
thought only of each thing as it came ; they have re- 
frained from viewing things in the whole which they con- 
stitute. And though others have denounced such Philis- 
tinism, and the " disconnection dull and spiritless " of 
Philistine conceptions, yet no doubt a certain peace of 
mind is gained by such modesty. No doubt the reli- 
gious man will ofttimes be disconcerted, as Robert Hall 
was disconcerted by reading Miss Austen's novels, when 
he realizes the contentment that may attend a finished 
secularity, and the charm that may be given in descrip- 
tion to a Philistine world. But the contentment after all 
is a "want-begotten rest," and the charm is that of still 
life. The mind that is truly awake will perceive the great 
Unity ; at least, if it is possible to remain a stranger to 
the thought, it is scarcely possible to lose it after having 
been once enlightened, after having once admitted a con- 
ception which so rapidly modifies the mind into wliich 
it enters. 



88 NATURAL RELIGION. 

But is this conception really so efficacious to modify 
the mind ? Is it of any practical value ? Is it not too 
large and vague ? Or if its power over minds in a cer- 
tain stage cannot be denied, if the wonderful effect it 
has had, even in its rudest shape, over the nations that 
have been " converted to Mohammedanism must be 
acknowledged, yet is there any reason to believe that 
civilized minds retain flexibility enough to be moulded 
by such influences ? The question, when examined, re- 
solves itself into two, of which only one is at all difficult 
to answer. That such a conception may exert a practical 
empire only too absolute, inspire a practical energy only 
too intense and an iconoclasm only too intolerant, is 
precisely what the new attitude of Science shows us. 
That reign of Science which is announced in these days 
as a kind of ultimate Reformation, what is it but the gen- 
eral diffusion and the acceptance as a practical rule of 
this very conception of God in nature ? Nothing but the 
vast slowness and intricacy of the process, drawn out 
through centuries, by which it has become dominant, 
with the constant appeal it made to toleration as long as 
it was weak, could have prevented us from seeing how 
masterful and rigorous the conception itself is and how 
intolerant it may become in the day of its power. There 
is no danger that the new system, considered as a the- 
ology, will be tame or colorless. But what will it be, 
considered as a religion ? That the religion of Unity 
may exist and be effective without the help of the Super- 
natural, has been shown. But it remains to show that in 
the advanced stages of human culture this religion can 
take possession of the mind and shape it with a power 
like that which other religions have wielded in other ages. 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 89 

Religious men tell us that God, viewed in Nature 
alone, appears so awful, so devoid of moral perfections, 
as to be no proper object of worship. 

Unquestionably there is some real foundation for this 
opinion. That God is too awful to be worshipped has 
been at times almost admitted by those who have wor- 
shipped Him most. Prophets used to speak of entering 
into the rocks and hiding in the dust for fear of Him. 
It is only because they were able to perceive dimly 
that which reassured them, that which mitigated the 
terror and made the greatness less insufferable, that 
religious men have been able to retain religious feelings. 
But for this they would have felt nothing but a stony 
stupefaction ; they would have armed their hearts with 
callousness, and have encountered hfe with stoic apa- 
thy. Religious men have always been in danger of that 
scorching of the brain which leads to fanaticism and 
inhumanity. It is not without danger that the brain 
tampers with so vast a thought, as on the other hand it 
can only keep aloof from it by resigning itself to a con- 
temptible littleness. What means there are of escaping 
this danger is a separate question, but as soon as it is 
escaped, terror and astonishment pass at once into wor- 
ship. Apart from pessimism there is nothing to prevent 
the most exclusive votary of science from worshipping. 
Not at any rate because there is no God to worship is 
science tempted to renounce worship, but it may be 
tempted by the necessity of concentration, by the ab- 
sorbing passion of analysis, by prudential limitation of 
the sphere of study, by a mistaken fear of the snares of 
the imagination. 

It may be thought that too much weight ought not to 



90 NATURAL RELIGION. 

be allowed to the declarations of scientific men that 
their pursuit leads to worship, particularly as such decla- 
rations are now less frequently made than formerly. Let 
us then adduce another proof. 

Worship expresses itself naturally in poetry. And 
again where a deity is recognized there are votaries, 
there are those who dedicate their lives to the worship 
of him. Now, is it true that God viewed in Nature has 
received the homage of no poetry? Is it true that 
Nature has made no votaries, has inspired no one? 
Has the Universe always appeared either so awful as to 
shut the mouths of those who contemplated it, or, on 
the other hand, so devoid of unity as to excite no sin- 
gle or distinct feehng? 

It would certainly be of little use to say. Here is God 
— worship Him ! to those at least who have been gazing 
upon the object all their lives, and yet have seen noth- 
ing to worship there ; unless we could show historically 
that the same contemplation has led others to worship. 
But this is easy. Ever since the worship of God founded 
too exclusively on supernaturalism began to decay, the 
worship of God in Nature has shown signs of reviving. 
Poetry and art in recent times have uniformly, and 
especially where they have been most hostile to the 
Church, pointed towards a new form of religion, towards 
a new worship of God. How striking a phenomenon is 
the appearance, since the middle of the last century, of 
the word Nature in all theories of literature and art ! 

As worship usually finds its expression in art, calling 
in architecture to design the temples of its Divinity and 
painting to embellish them, and invoking him by the aid 
of the poet and of the musical composer, so, on the other 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. QI 

hand, art is never really inspired by anything but worship. 
The true artist is he who worships, for worship is habitual 
admiration. It is the enthusiastic appreciation of some- 
thing, and such enthusiastic appreciation is the qualifica- 
tion without which an artist cannot even be conceived. 
Wherever, therefore, art is, there is religion ; but the re- 
ligion may be what has been described above as Pagan. 
It may be a mere appreciation of material and individual 
beauty. To become religion in the complete sense, it 
must appreciate the unity in things ; and even of such 
religion there is a higher and a lower form. The lower 
form is that which, while it perceives a unity in nature, 
yet takes at the same time an inadequate view of nature, 
not including in its view, or not making sufficiently promi- 
nent, what is highest in nature^ — that is, the moral prin- 
ciple. Such religion may be said to worship a mere 
Jove ; but if morality receives its due place, such religion 
is, in a worthy sense, the worship of God. Now there 
took place towards the end of the last century a remark- 
able revolution in art. For the first time artists began 
to perceive the unity of what they contemplated ; and for 
the first time, in consequence, they began to feel that their 
pursuit was no desultory amusement, but an elevating 
worship. Such a thought scarcely entered into the mind 
of the poets of the seventeenth century. Milton is in- 
deed haunted by the sense of something priestly or pro- 
phetic in his vocation, but the conception in its clearness 
belongs to the age of Goethe and Wordsworth, and it has 
had most manifestly the effect of increasing the self- 
respect of artists ever since. Here is the best answer to 
the question whether God considered purely in Nature 
is an object of worship. No terror, and still less any 



92 NATURAL RELIGION. 

hopeless incomprehensibility in Nature, prevented these 
poets from rendering a worship by which their own lives 
were dignified, and in a manner hallowed. 

Many names from many countries might be quoted in 
illustration of this, for it was characteristic of that age 
that everywhere the men of sensibility, the artists, and 
especially the poets, as .using the instrument of greatest 
compass, assumed a high and commanding tone. The 
function of the prophet was then revived, and poets for 
the first time aspired to teach the art of life, and founded 
schools. The greatest poets in earlier times had aimed 
at nothing of this sort ; but from the time of Rousseau, 
through that of Goethe, Schiller, Chateaubriand, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, down to our own age, 
poets have helped to make opinions, have influenced phi- 
losophy, social institutions, and pohtics. But let us think 
for a moment of the two greatest of these names. 

Goethe has always been an object of peculiar horror 
to the religious world, so tranquil was his indifference to 
all that they called Christianity. Not only Christianity 
but morality itself, as it is commonly understood, was 
not much favored in his writings nor perhaps in his life. 
' There could be no greater stumbling-block to all who 
were in the habit of assuming that conventional Christi- 
anity is the one form, and conventional morality the one 
evidence, of true religion. Indeed so incredible did it 
seem that a great genius could be absolutely independent 
of religion, that such persons were driven to the shift of 
denying Goethe to have genius. But in the first place it 
was not to be expected that a religion independent of 
traditional creeds and inspired by no supernatural behefs 
would produce moral results precisely similar to the fruits 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 93 

of orthodox Christianity, nor again is it to be assumed 
that such an independent reHgion would not produce 
other results altogether beyond the sphere of morality. 
We have not yet inquired what is the precise relation of 
Natural Rehgion either to Christianity or to morality. 
Goethe is called into court at this point only to prove 
that Natural Religion may be a living influence, and that 
its fruits may be rich and vigorous, not to show that they 
are precisely what we could wish or what we had ex- 
pected. It may be affirmed then that the power and 
genius of Goethe was intimately connected with his re- 
ligion, that his religion gave his life unity and dignity and 
made it a perpetual regulated energy of the feelings, and 
that God in Nature was the chief object of his worship. 
Not this or that class of phenomena, but the unity that 
is visible in all was the thought that possessed him. He 
felt, as he says, the whole six days' work go on within 
him. To know this by science, and to reahze, appro- 
priate, and assimilate it in art, was his task and his hap- 
piness. When I call this perpetual rapt contemplation 
by the name of religion, I am not interpreting his feelings 
into a new language. I am using his own language ; it 
is Goethe himself who calls it so. ^^ Who has science 
and art," he says, " has religion."^ 

As to the attacks which were made upon him by the 
pietists and the conventional moralists, it might be easy 
to defend him in general by denying that the religious 
mode of a given time and place is to be identified with 

^ Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt 
Hat auch Religion ! 
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt 
Der habe Religion ! 

Zahne Xenien, 



94 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



Christianity or that received proprieties are an infallible 
standard of morality. It would certainly be easy to show 
that he had not merely genius but great and rare virtues, 
some of which, — his indefatigable industry, his superi- 
ority to sordid or frivolous or envious thoughts, — were 
made easy to him by his religion of nature. There re- 
mains the fact that the idea of duty and self-sacrifice ap- 
pears not to be very sacred in his mind — rather, perhaps, 
to be irritating, embarrassing, odious to him. But it is 
difficult to trace the connection so often asserted between 
this moral indifference and the so-called Pantheism of 
Goethe. If Hindoos have been known to push Panthe- 
ism to a denial of moral responsibility, what real analogy 
is there between their rude primitive belief and his ener- 
getic nature-worship ? If Goethe thought of God mainly 
as the creative Artist, and did not much associate the 
ideas of duty or of self-sacrifice with Him, and if he 
showed an epicurean indifference on some occasions 
which seemed to call for energy, there is no such diffi- 
culty in explaining this fact by the circumstances of his 
life that we should be driven to accuse his religion. 
Many have seen in the moral principle the highest thing 
in the universe, who nevertheless have recognized nothing 
beyond Nature. He who identifies God with Nature will 
assuredly not omit from his idea of God that which he 
thinks highest in Nature. 

No similar attacks were ever made upon Wordsworth. 
Up to a certain point Wordsworth and Goethe agree in 
their way of regarding the universe. Both begin with a 
warm and perfectly healthy Paganism. They refuse wor- 
ship to nothing that has a right to it. Their sympathies 
take hold of everything, and with so much warmth, that 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 95 

they have made the old mythologies intelligible to us by 
their poetry, and brought back the days of nymphs and 
river-gods. At the same time they agree in setting the 
whole above the parts, in worshipping the unity of things 
much more than the things themselves. Their service of 
adoration rises gradually to the highest object, and closes 
in the Hebrew manner with, ^' Among the gods there is 
none like unto Thee, O God." Yet who can charge 
Wordsworth with laxity or even with any alarming bold- 
ness in his treatment of moral subjects ? He is an ardent 
and at the same time a somewhat conservative moralist. 
If it is just to call him a pantheist, all that can be said is : 
In that case pantheism has not the effect commonly at- 
tributed to it of cutting the sinews of virtue. 

It is easier in some respects to discern the practical 
working of Natural Religion in such a Ufe as Wordsworth's 
than in that of Goethe. For Wordsworth's life was simple 
and unworldly, and betrays under its transparent surface 
every impulse that moved it. We may ask then why the 
religious world should refuse as they do to treat Words- 
worth's professions of religious feeling seriously. " Oh, 
yes ! " they say, " he made for himself a sort of poetical 
religion," and they imply that it had no more reality than 
the conventional heathenism of other poets, or the Arca- 
dia of modern pastoral. Most of them would be utterly 
disconcerted to hear him called the most religious man, 
and the greatest reviver of religion, of his age. And yet 
it is somewhat unsatisfactory to account for the religious- 
ness of his poetry by the conventionalism of poetic lan- 
guage, when we consider that he was precisely the re- 
former who put down this conventionalism, and gave new 
life to poetry by making it sincere. This writer then, 



96 NATURAL RELIGION. 

being under a sort of vow to use no insincere language, 
declares himself a worshipper of Nature, and in the most 
deliberate manner asserts over and over again that in this 
worship he found all the satisfaction, — the lasting inward 
peace, the occasional rapture, — that can flow from the 
best religion. He has no happiness, he assures us, and 
he can conceive no happiness, out of this religion. This 
assurance he reiterates with a monotonous prolixity, which 
is natural and impressive in devotional writings, but was 
likely to prove, and has proved, fatal to his popularity as 
a poet. What better guarantee could he give of his seri- 
ousness ? How few writings commonly called devotional 
have such strong marks of genuineness as these, or are 
so uniformly clear of the suspicion of having been written 
less to give expression to a feeling than to give existence 
to a feeling- by expression! And what is there in the 
poet's life which should lead us to suspect his professions 
of insincerity ? Did he not really rest content with that 
treasure which he professed to value above all the riches 
of the world? Did he not remain faithful to his choice? 
He may be called the saint of the religion of Nature 
on account of the unworldliness both of his Hfe and of 
his writings, which refuse to be tried by a mere literary 
standard. And why should we refuse to admit that Nat- 
ural Religion has in this instance produced its saint? To 
the religious world no doubt such " natural piety " seems 
unreal ; the fixed ecclesiastical tradition rejects the alien 
type. Not only a dogmatic creed, but either devoted 
philanthropy or else asceticism, — a "visage marred " by 
some contact with pain — is indispensable to the ecclesi- 
astical conception of the saint. Wordsworth's life was 
not passed in philanthropic undertakings ; he neither mor- 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 



97 



tified nor devoted himself; his happiness was enormous 
and never clouded. Here again his lot has been similar 
to that of Goethe,. who has lost men's sympathies, partly 
because he was exempt from suffering. Wordsworth's 
prosperity was of a much more modest kind, but it was 
equally uniform. Neither of these men knew much of 
the darker side of human life. Goethe, we know, shunned 
the sight of whatever was painful with a care that wore 
the appearance of selfishness. Wordsworth had none of 
this Epicureanism ; but, accustomed as we are to picture 
the saint as in the very thick of human misery, as sur- 
rounded with distresses with which he identifies himself, 
and which he devotes his life to comforting or remedying, 
we do not readily imagine it possible for a saint to pass 
his life in a perpetual course of lonely enjoyment as Words- 
worth did among the lakes and mountains, the objects of 
his passion. 

The type is no doubt somewhat different, yet less dif- 
ferent than it seems. Enjoyment was always held to be 
in the lot of the saint, but enjoyment such as the world 
cannot understand ; if it became him to encounter the 
pain of sacrifice and to be ^' acquainted with grief," it be- 
hooved him also to triumph over both. Now the happi- 
ness of Wordsworth was of an unworldly kind, and if it 
strikes the eye more than his self-denial, more than his 
want of wealth and of success in his pursuit, this is just 
as it should be, ^' this is the victory that overcometh the 
world." At the cost of popularity and in spite of ridicule 
he was sincere in his work, and he had his reward in the 
"cheerful heart," the " soaring spirit" of which he himself 
spoke. That art of plain living, which moralists in all 
ages have prized so much, was mastered completely by 



98 NATURAL RELIGION. 

Wordsworth. He found the secret of victory where 
alone it can be found. He surrendered the wealth that 
is earned by labor, trade, speculation, in exchange for the 
wealth that is given away. Others might purchase and 
hoard and set up fences, calling it property to exclude 
others from enjoyment. To his share fell what all alike 
may take, all those things that have no economical value, 
and that are therefore denied to industry, in short the 
goodly universe to which " he was wedded in love and 
holy passion." 

The completeness of his victory over adverse fortune 
creates in fact a sort of illusion as if there had never been 
a struggle. And yet there was matter for a tragedy in his 
ill-success. It was such as has driven many men to sui- 
cide, many to settled despondency, many to cynicism, 
and many to abandonment of their enterprise. But his 
healthy strength of heart triumphs so easily that we lose 
the moral of the story. We become as careless of the 
injustice he suffered as he was himself, and forget the 
brutal dulness against which he had to contend, when we 
see that it did not affect for a moment his happiness or 
his temper or the soundness of his judgment. This tri- 
umphant force of character came to him from his religion. 
From the Eternal Being among whose mountains he wan- 
dered, there came to his heart steadfastness, stillness, a 
sort of reflected or reproduced eternity. 

Here is virtue in a form very unlike the busy and phil- 
anthropic Christianity to which we are most accustomed, 
of which it is the characteristic mark to seek out distress, 
and bestow time and trouble upon the relief of it. But 
it is less unlike some older manifestations of the Christian 
life. We owe to Christianity itself the story of Martha 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 99 

and Mary. And though the Middle Ages may have been 
too monastic in their notions of the religious life, yet per- 
haps there was something in the notion of the hermit ; 
more things certainly are done by solitary worship than 
the world dreams of. If work is worship, it is implied in 
this proverb that worship is at least work. It was not for 
nothing that our "glorious eremite " sacrificed work for 
worship ; that the Symeon Stylites of the God in nature, 
stood there so long ''on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake." 
No modern EngHshman has done more to redeem- our 
life from vulgarity. 

What the religious world calls mere Pantheism sci- 
ence may perhaps be disposed to treat as mere disguised 
Christianity. No doubt Wordsworth's worship of the 
God in Nature was blended with Christian ideas. A 
Christian faith in redemption and reconcihation neutral- 
ized his sense of the evil which is in the world, and pre- 
ser\^ed him from the pessimism which is the' besetting 
difficulty of Natural Religion. Let us remark however 
that he himself always declares that his optimism came 
to him not from Christianity but from Nature. He takes 
pains, again and again, to make it clear that revealed re- 
ligion does not seem to him to supply a defect in natural 
religion, but only, one would really think somewhat su- 
perfluously, to tell over again, and to his mind less im- 
pressively, what is told by nature. The doctrine of a 
future life, which he calls " the head and mighty para- 
mount of truths," is at the same time, he says, to one 
who lives among the mountains a perfectly plain tale. 
He reverences the volume that declares the mystery, the 
life that cannot die ; but in the mountains does he feel 
his faith, — which means, beyond mistake, that the gospel 



100 NATURAL RELIGION. 

of the visible universe is not only in harmony with the 
written gospel, but is far more explicit and convincing. 
There may, perhaps, be something embarrassed and con- 
fused in the joining of his views, but this only makes the 
strength and depth of his natural religion appear more 
clearly. 

And yet it is not the '' argument from design " which 
influences Wordsworth, though he may have accepted 
that argument, and occasionally urged it himself. It was 
not upon curious ' evidence industriously collected, and 
slightly overweighing when summed up the evidence 
which could be produced on the other side, that his faith 
was founded. Nature, taken in the large, inspired him 
with faith, because the contemplation of it filled him with a 
happiness his mind could scarcely contain. As the scep- 
ticism of most men is founded upon their experience 
that the universe does not supply their wants, does not 
seem to have in view their happiness, so the faith of 
Wordsworth was founded upon his own happy contrary 
experience. He has unbounded trust in Nature, because 
he has always found her outrunning his expectations, over- 
paying every loss, unfathomably provident and beneficent. 

His sneers at experimental science, at the botanist and 
geologist who invaded his sohtudes, are not suggested by 
any misgiving that his view of Nature will not bear ex- 
amination. We may think, if we will, that he ought to 
have had such misgivings, but it is certain that his voice 
is always given for truth at any price, for unsparing ex- 
amination. And the example of Goethe shows us that 
without Wordsworth's optimism the rehgion of Nature 
can live. No one is less subject to illusions than Goethe, 
no one more alive to the painful limitations which Nature 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 1 01 

imposes on our ideals. He at least does not blind him- 
self, and accordingly he is the passionate student, as well 
as the poet, of Nature. 

Nevertheless this horror of experiment is most charac- 
teristic of the religious way of viewing Nature. It is the 
horror of synthesis for analysis, of life for death, of youth 
and love for the dissecting-room and the charnel-house. 
Wordsworth's quarrel is not with the sceptic but with the 
analyst ; it is the paralysis of feeling that he dreads, and 
not any unwelcome discoveries. He protests against 
those who would '' creep and botanize, upon a mother's 
grave," such characters as the philosopher whom Balzac 
has since shown us decomposing a wife's tears. ^ For 
according to Wordsworth so far from taking pains to pul- 
verize into their invisible elements the great unities that 
act upon our feelings, so far from studying to put pounds 
of flesh and pints of blood in place of friends and rela- 
tions, we ought rather to recover and reanimate the great 
unities we have already lost by this suicidal process. We 
ought not to think of the sea as a vast quantity of water, 
no, but as ^^ a mighty being." On this principle how, let 
us ask, ought we to think of the Univei-se ? It was there- 
fore those who had no God, in whose minds noticing 
bound together the whole multitude of impressions that 
visit us, and whose feelings therefore had no coherence 
or unity, tliat he denounced as men who 

"Viewing all things unremittingly, 
In disconnection dull and spiritless, 
Break down all grandeur; still unsatisfied 
With the perverse attempt while littleness 
May yet become more little." 

' " Tiens, dit-il, en voyant les pleurs de sa femme, j'ai decompose les 
larmes. Les larmes conticnnent un pen de phosphate de chaux, de chlorure 
de sodium, du mucus et de I'eau." — Balzac, La Recherche de PAbsclu. 



102 NATUR-\L RELIGION. 

If we see here religion in its fresh untrammelled oper- 
ation, we see at the same time its invaluable use. For 
the higher hterature was reformed in England by this 
man's fidehty to the object of his worship. A flush of 
life passing tlirough poetry, a new sense awakened in 
many individuals, made life richer and purer. His very 
austerity and monotony, his want of all popular talent, 
make him the more striking as an example of the power 
of religion. If he had had the brilliancy of some other 
poets we might have attributed his influence to mere lit- 
erar}^ skill. His clumsiness, what is called his heaviness, 
set liis sincerity in stronger rehef. What he is commis- 
sioned to tell appears all the more weighty from the slow- 
ness and embarrassment of the speaker. 

But for such examples the dignit}^ and the highest use 
of literature would be lost. This danger is especially 
great in an age like the present, when the state of letters 
is a very democratic republic, when the hterary Emperors 
and Prime ]\Iinisters are chosen by universal suffrage. 
Such an age cannot but abound, as Sainte Beuve remarks 
of the present age, in Hterary charlatanry, when it is an 
accepted maxim that the greatest author, at any rate the 
greatest poet, is he who ^^Tites what the greatest number 
of people Hke to read. A kind of literary ETtilitarianism 
sets in, of which the watchword is '^ the greatest pleasure 
of the greatest number." The power of a poet is then 
measured simply by his control over the sources of 
laughter and tears. Public taste may go very far along 
this road before it discovers its mistake. All seems lively 
and busy in the literary world while Waverley Novels and 
Childe Harolds take the public by storm, while we remark 
with admiration that this author's characters are as fa- 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. IO3 

miliar to every one as his own personal friends and that 
author's sayings become proverbs in the general mouth. 
In the midst of such a literary ferment how pale and 
cold seems the poetry of a Wordsworth ! How dull he is ! 
And how dull would Goethe seem too if only Goethe had 
not written the First Part of Faust ! Naturally ! Such 
authors do not care much to make their readers laugh or 
weep. "To stir the blood I have no cunning art," says 
Wordsworth. Ach die zdrtliche7i Herzen ! ein Ffuscher 
vermag sie zic ruhren ! says Goethe. Nor do such 
authors make it their study to say what the pubHc will 
like to hear. Ihr sollt was lernen^ — I meant to teach 
you something, says Goethe again. They deal not in 
popular falsehoods but in unpopular truths. They are 
attracted by topics which the popular writer instinctively 
avoids, saying. Oh ! the public will never attend to that ! 
And indeed the public often receive their gifts but sul- 
lenly. It was overawed by Goethe, but Wordsworth 
it regards now as it regarded him at first with steadfast 
indifference and contempt. 

These are the writers who enrich the literature of a 
nation, who save it from the nation itself, its natural 
enemy. And to sustain such writers in their arduous 
course they must have religion in the sense which has 
here been given to the word. In the long run nothing 
less than religion will bear them through, though an aris- 
tocracy or a learned class may occasionally suffice. But 
an aristocracy imposes fetters of its own for those which 
it strikes off, and a learned class will appreciate indeed 
certain thoughts to which the multitude are indifferent, 
but not wholly new thoughts, not thoughts foreign to its 
learning. Religion alone — some absorbing contempla- 



104 NATUR-\L RELIGION. 

tion, some spiritual object more necessary than livelihood, 
more precious than fame — preserves originality and thus 
feeds literature. It alone can give an author that happy 
arrogance of Wordsworth, whose admirers complained 
that he was scarcely as grateful as he should have been 
for their efforts in the cause of his fame, so happy was 
he without fame in the serene temple of his worship. 

The result of the movement in art ^^hich was repre- 
sented abroad by Goethe, and in England principally by 
Wordsworth, is still plainly perceptible both in the art 
and even to some extent in the religion of the present 
age. An age which is called atheistic, and in which 
atheism is loudly professed, shows in all its imaginative 
literature a religiousness — a sense of the Divine which 
was wanting in the more orthodox ages. Before Church 
traditions had been freely tested, there was one rigid way 
of thinking about God — one definite channel through 
which Divine grace alone could pass — the channel 
guarded by the Church He had founded '^As if they 
would confine the Interminable, and tie Him to His own 
prescript ! " Accordingly, when doubt was thrown upon 
the doctrines of the Church, there seemed an imminent 
danger of atheism, and we have still the habit of denot- 
ing by this name the denial of that conception of God 
which the Church has consecrated. But by the side of 
this gradual obscuring of the ecclesiastical view of God, 
there has gone on a gradual rediscovery of Him in 
another aspect. The total effect of this simultaneous 
obscuration of one part of the orb and revelation of the 
other has been to set before us God in an aspect rather 
Judaic than Christian, We see Him less as an object 
of love, and more as an object of terror, mixed with 



NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 



los 



delight Much indeed has been lost — it is to be hoped 
not finally — but something also has been gained. For 
the modern views of God, so far as they go, have a 
reality — a freshness that the others wanted. In ortho- 
dox times the name of God was almost confined to defi- 
nitely religious writings, or was used as part of a conven- 
tional language. But now, either under the name of 
God, or under that of Nature, or under that of Science, 
or under that of Law, the conception works freshly and 
powerfully in a multitude of minds. It is an idea indeed 
that causes much unhappiness, much depression. Men 
now reason with God as Job did, or feel crushed before 
Him as Moses, or wrestle vv^ith Him as Jacob, or blas- 
pheme Him ; they do not so easily attain the Christian 
hope. But with whatever confusion and astonishment, 
His presence is felt really and not merely asserted in 
hollow professions ; it inspires poetry much more than 
in orthodox times. It may be confidently said that in 
this modern time when the complaint is so often heard, 
verstorben ist der Herrgott oben, and after those most 
recent discoveries which in the surprise caused by their 
novelty and vastness seem to dissipate all ancient faiths 
at a blow, the conception of God lives with an intensity 
which it never had before. This very conception indeed 
it is which now depresses us with its crushing weight; 
The overwhelming sense of littleness and helplessness of 
which we complain is not atheism, though atheism has 
similar symptoms. It is that very thought, " As for man 
his days are as grass,'* which is suggested by the contem- 
plation of the Eternal, it is the prostration caused by a 
greatness in which we are lost, it is what we might ven- 
ture perhaps to call the super stition of the true God, 



I06 ■ NATURAL RELIGION. 

If men cp,n add once more the Christian confidence 
to the Hebraic awe, tlie Cliristianity tliat will result will 
be of a far higher kind than that which passes too often 
for Christianity now, which, so far from being love added 
to fear, and casting out fear, is a presumptuous and 
effeminate love that never knew fear. 



PART II. 

NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



109 



*^ But has all this any practical bearing ? 

*^ When a religion such as Christianity loses its hold 
" after having possessed the minds of men for centuries, 
" as a matter of course a sort of phanto^n of it will 
" haicnt the earth for a time. Its doctrines, rejected 
" as doctrines, will be retahied for a while as rhetoric 
'' a7id imagery ; even the feelings which grew out of those 
" doctrines will for a while survive them, A Neochris- 
" tianism must inevitably arise, which will console for a 
'^ short i?iterval some feeble minds, while stronger logi- 
" cia7is refrain in contemptuous pity from telling them 
'' their steed 's a mock-horse, and they really carry what 
'^ they say carries them. 

" To such pious dreamers the plain English intellect 
" loves to apply a practical test. To see whether what 
" they call their religio7i has any real existeiice, it scru- 
" tinizes their conduct, asks whether and in what respects 
" they lead a different life from others who do not profess 
" to be religious, what religious practices they have, and 
" especially what they sacrifice for their religion, 

" Often this test works so effectively as to save the 
" trouble of all further discussion. The Neochristian, 
" who was perhaps prepared for argume7it, if he is not 
^'provoked by argument, gradually forgets his crotchet, 
^' He does not cease to think it true, but he ceases to find 



no 

" // important. He ceases gradually to use its phrase- 
'' ology, because he feels after all that it is 07ily phrase- 
" ology. The large interpretation^ the metaphorical sense, 
" which at first seemed to save the doctrine, is discov- 
" ered after all only to save appearances ; a?id down this 
" inclined plane the passage is made, not out of one 
" religion into another similar to it, but out of religion 
" itself i?2to the secular life, not out of the old Church into 
" a new and grander Church but out of the Church into 
"the World. 

" Another still plainer test is often applied, which 
" may be called the statistical test, ' You call your- 
" self a religion. Good I how many churches have you 
" built, and how many people attend them 2 Where 
"are your missionary societies, and how much money 
" do they raise per annum ? ' This test too, though it 
" may seem rude, serves to dissipate much seiitimental 
" illusion,''^ 

Such are the criticisms which are, and always have 
been, applied to schemes of Natural ReHgion. Let us 
inquire then whether the system is strong and substan- 
tial enough to withstand them. Let us turn from theory 
to practice. 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. HI 



CHAPTER I. 

RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 

The practical question of the present day is how to 
defend the very principle of religion against naked secu- 
larity. It was not so in the last age, when scepticism 
was much nearer in tone and temper to religion than it 
is now. In those days the cry was not so much against 
religion itself as against alleged corruptions of it. It 
was asserted that the grand simple truths of rehgion had 
been sophisticated, obscured by incomprehensible dog- 
mas and unnecessary ritual. If religious practices and 
ways of thinking, the groveUing fears of the devotee and 
his servile anxiety to save his soul, were derided, the 
derision was mixed with respect, for such feelings were 
held to be proofs of man's greatness and of the Infinite 
that he carries within him. It was a favorite position 
that religious dogmas might almost be called true, so 
long as they were not spoiled by being taken too liter- 
ally. Much was said of the infinite nature of duty, of 
the infinite difference between right and wrong ; it was 
admitted that religion deserved all respect for teaching, 
however imperfectly, these all-important truths, and that 
much more than respect was due to the great Teachers 
and Prophets who first awakened men to the perception 
of them, who first taught that " one thing is needful," and 



112 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

*^that it profits a man nothing if he should gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul." 

So long as there was so much agreement between the 
orthodox and the philosophers, so long as all alike ex- 
horted us simply to do our duty and to believe that in 
the path of duty, — which by some arrangement provi- 
dential or other was always easy to find, — no harm 
either in this world or the next could happen to us, 
we felt a firm foundation under our feet. But what has 
become of that foundation now ? Can we gather from 
what we overhear of the discussions of philosophers that 
they still approve, even in a general way, the established 
teaching ? We find that they have analyzed the idea of 
duty in a manner highly satisfactory to themselves, but 
the result is that all its mysteriousness has disappeared. 
They have inquired what it is that makes the voice of 
conscience sound so very authoritative ; is their conclu- 
sion likely to satisfy the almost infinite number of people 
who feel quite helpless till they hear an imperative com- 
mand, and who, having lost the Pope and since that the 
Bible, have trusted that at least the inner voice could 
never lose its authority? ''The infinite nature of duty," 
with all such mouthfilhng phrases, has passed out of 
fashion. The Law of Duty remains indeed authoritative, 
but its authority seems scarcely so awful and unique as 
formerly. 

And will its decrees remain unaltered in their tenor? 
A curious opinion — which cannot be discussed here — 
is current that when all our religious beHefs have been 
shaken our principles of morality will remain unaltered. 
Nevertheless it is evident that denials of the received 
morahty and revolutionary views of morality have ap- 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 



113 



peared — perhaps only by a coincidence — at the time 
and in the circles where religious behef has been shaken 
most violently. Secularism is in itself no new thing, and 
its negations might long be disregarded as the result of 
ignorance ; but may they not take a new character when 
they are combined with the negations of the reigning 
philosophy? And on this tide do we not drift down to 
an ocean of absolute secularity? Can we not foresee 
a time when religion shall confess itself beaten in fair 
argument by its old antagonist the world ? 

It was in great part by supernaturalism that religion 
used to maintain the contest. " You would be right," so 
ran the argument, '^ if this world were all. In that case, 
to be sure, why should we trouble ourselves ? Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die ! — Vivamus, mea Lesbia, 
atque amemus ! But there is another world ! " And 
then followed all the famihar proofs, which were not 
indeed exclusively founded on stories of miracle, but 
still drew from such stories most of the practical force, 
the vividness which made that other world something 
more than a mere possibility. Are we not then brought 
perilously near the secularist conclusion when the fashion 
of thought sets so strongly as it does now against super- 
naturalism ? Is not St. Paul's argument suddenly turned 
round so as to tell the same way as that of Catullus ? 

At the present moment therefore everything depends on 
the question whether there is a Natural Religion. May 
we without pledging ourselves to any behef in miracles 
or in an invisible, supernatural world continue to protest 
against secularity, continue to affirm that ^^ one thing is 
needful," and to ask, ^^ What does it profit a man if he 
should gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " 

8 



114 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

The party which most openly professes secularity does 
not itself use the brutal language we might expect. On 
the contrary, it adopts a high-flown style rife with such 
words as brotherhood. The truth is that, like all vast 
confused masses of men, this party can scarcely speak 
without contradicting itself. It cannot be reasoned 
with, because it holds no definite position but rather 
tries to hold all positions at once. It exaggerates selfish- 
ness and exaggerates self-sacrifice, and mixes them to- 
gether in inextricable confusion. If then we would dis- 
cover any principles of secularity, we must look where 
we may find them more distinctly and logically stated. 

There seem to be two reasoned ideals of life which 
have risen out of the rebellion against Christianity, which 
are not mere modifications of the old system but adverse 
to it, so as to appear at first sight directly irrehgious. 

First, there is the ideal of the artist. He has long 
cherished a secret grudge against morality. The prud- 
ery of virtue is his great hindrance. He believes that it 
is our morality which prevents the modern world from 
rivaUing the arts of Greece. He finds that even the in- 
dividual artist seems corrupted and spoiled for his busi- 
ness if he allows morality to get too much control over 
him. The great masters, he notices, show a certain 
indifference, a certain superiority to it ; often they auda- 
ciously defy it. The virtuous artists are mostly to be 
looked for in the second class, into which moreover it is 
doubtful whether they have not been admitted by favor. 
Hence he becomes most seriously and unaffectedly scep- 
tical about the unapproachable sovereignty of the law of 
Duty. He does not in his soul believe that the mischief 
it does to art is compensated by any good done to 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 



115 



society. He remarks the mistakes made by Christian 
philanthropy, the evils caused by Roman virtue, the 
homeliness of honesty, the primness of purity. He sides 
with the Medicean world against Savonarola, with the 
theatre against the Puritans or Jeremy Colher. He 
does not in any sense admit the current platitudes, and 
he would rather on his deathbed have it to reflect that 
he had painted a really good picture, or written a really 
good poem, than that he had done his duty under great 
temptations and at great sacrifices. He had rather leave 
the world enriched and embelHshed, than do some dis- 
mal deed of virtue which perhaps, like the majority of 
really virtuous deeds, would not even prove a good sub- 
ject for a poem or a novel. 

Next there is the ideal of the scientific investigator. 
How much better, thinks he, to have advanced our 
knowledge of the laws of the universe only by a step than 
to have lived the most virtuous life or died the most self- 
sacrificing death ! The struggles of virtuous men in so 
many cases are thrown away ; their active heroism or 
active philanthropy is only far too active ! How much 
better if they could only curb this restlessness and be 
content to '^sit still in a room"! As he looks at it 
from the opposite point of view to the artist, the man of 
science may think the career of virtue attractive enough 
indeed, for it has more variety and incident than his own 
uniform labor in the study or the laboratory, but he 
despises it as popular, and distrusts its results. All such 
action strikes him as premature, the convictions on which 
it is based as unscientific. " We must understand " — 
so he reasons — '^ more than we do about sociology 
before we can sacrifice either our energies or our time to 



Il6 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

the reform or to the conservation of any existing system, 
poHtical or social. In the present state of our knowledge 
it is- mere charlatanry to take a part ; it is a proof of 
philosophic incapacity to allow our judgment to incline 
to one side rather than to the other. The laws of the 
universe can actually be, to an indefinite extent, unveiled ; 
the process is going on rapidly, and infinitely more la- 
borers are wanted to gather in the harvest. In these 
circumstances it is a kind of sin to occupy oneself in any 
other task. We have nothing to do but think, observe, 
and write." And thus he enters upon a life to which the 
platitudes current about virtue have no application. To 
the student consumed by the passion of research, right 
and wrong become to a great extent meaningless words. 
He has little time for any tasks into which morality 
could possibly enter. Instead of '' conduct " making up, 
as we have been told, four-fifths or five-sixths of life, to 
such a person it makes a most inconsiderable fraction of 
life. He has his occupation, which consumes his time 
and his powers. There may be virtue in the choice of 
such a life at the first in preference to one more worldly 
or selfish. But when once he has made the choice, the 
activity of virtue in his daily life is reduced to a mini-* 
mum. His pursuit stands to him in the place of friends, 
so .that he has but few and slight ties to society. And 
the pursuit itself may be a sohtary one, not leading him 
to have associates in his working hours. But though so 
solitary, such a hfe may be to him, if not satisfying, yet 
preferable beyond comparison, and on the most solid 
grounds, to any other hfe he knows of. It may be full 
of an occupation for the thoughts, so inexhaustibly inter- 
esting as to make emiui, in such a man's hfe, an extinct 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 



117 



and almost fabulous form of evil ; at the same time it 
may be full of the sense of progress made both by the 
individual himself and by the race through his labors. 
And yet, though so peaceful and, compared with most 
lives, so happy, such a life may be almost entirely out of 
relation ahke to virtue and to vice. Instead of that painful 
conflict with temptation which morahsts describe, there 
may be an almost unbroken peace arising from the ab- 
sence of temptation ; instead of the gradual formation of 
virtuous habits, there may be the gradual disuse of all 
habits except the habit of thought and study ; there may 
be perpetual self-absorption without what is commonly 
called selfishness, total disregard of other people, to- 
gether with an unceasing labor for the human race ; a 
life in short like that of the vestal, ^^ the world forgetting, 
by the world forgot," yet without any love or heavenly 
communion. 

Here are two ideals of hfe which may seem at first 
sight wholly irreligious or secular. They derive nothing 
either from theology' or from any spiritualist philosophy. 
The one is a mere enthusiasm for beauty, while the vo- 
taries of the other can see indeed an infinite difference 
between truth and error, and astonish the moralist him- 
self by the emphasis with which they denounce what is 
unscientific or unverified; but as to right and wrong, it 
is a distinction they very seldom have occasion for, and 
which scarcely seems to them to deserve the solemnity 
with which morahsts invest it. 

These heresies are not stated here that they may be 
refuted. We are not about to undertake to show that 
after all the moral principle is that which is highest in 
man, or point out what bad effects follow in communi- 



I I 8 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

ties when either Art or Science usurp the honors which 
belong to virtuous action. Much might be said on these 
topics, but what we remark here is that such heresies, 
so far from implying any depreciation of rehgion as 
such, tacitly presuppose its unique importance, and so 
far from tending to show that religion is after all not the 
one thing needful, derive all their plausibility^ from the 
assumption that it is. For what is it that is alleged in 
behalf of Art and Science by those who take such high 
views of them ? Is it alleged that they are sufficient for 
human life in spite of having no affinity mth religion? 
Or is it not rather for the contrary reason that they are 
themselves of the nature of religion ! The artist does 
not say to the morahst, '' I am as good as you, though 
you worship and I do not : " but he says, '^ It is because 
you are so narrow-minded that you charge me with hav- 
ing no religion. I do not admit the charge j and it is 
just because I feel that I have a religion as truly as you, 
though of a different kind, that I question your superior- 
ity. Yours is the rehgion of right, mine is the religion 
of beaut}^; they differ, no doubt, as their objects differ, 
but they agree in having the nature of religion. Ele- 
vated feelings, feelings that lift man above himself, admi- 
radon become habitual and raised into a principle of 
life, a lively sensitiveness when disrespect or indiffer- 
ence are shoA\m towards the object of our worship, these 
are common to both." Not less does the man of science 
value himself on having a rehgion ; it is the religion of law 
and of truth. Nay, he for his part is often disposed to 
regard himself as not only more religious, but actually 
more virtuous than the morahst. For he beheves that 
his love of truth is more simple, more unreserved, and 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 1 19 

more entirely self-sacrificing than that of the moralist, 
whom he suspects occasionally of suppressing or dis- 
guising truth for fear of weakening social institutions or 
of offending weak brethren. It is evident then that if 
the same men say at other times that they care nothing 
for religion, or that they disbelieve religion, they are not 
to be taken as speaking of religion as such, but of the 
particular religion which prevails in their neighborhood. 
The popular Christianity of the day, in short, is for the 
artist too melancholy and sedate, and for the man of 
science too sentimental and superficial ; in short it is too 
melancholy for the one and not melancholy enough for 
the other. They become, therefore, dissenters from the 
existing religion ; sympathizing too little with the popu- 
lar worship, they worship by themselves and dispense 
with outward forms. But they protest at the same time 
that in strictness they separate from the religious bodies 
around them only because they themselves know of a 
purer or a happier religion. 

After all then the old maxim stands fast, and man has 
a soul, which if he lose it will be of small profit to him 
to gain the whole world. For say to the artist, '' Never 
mind the moralists who affront you by their solemn airs ; 
what do you think of the man who neither worships 
with them nor yet with you, who is insensible to beauty 
as well as to right?" In a moment he who but now 
was carping at your language will turn round and bor- 
row it. '^ The man," he will say, " whose heart never 
goes forth in yearnings or in blessings towards beautiful 
things, before whom all forms pass and leave him as 
cold as before, who simply labels things or prices them 
for the market, but never worships or loves ; of such a 



I20 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

man we may say that he has no soul ; and however for- 
tunate he may be esteemed, or may esteem himself, he 
remams ahvays essentially poor and miserable." More 
sublime still is and always has been the contempt of 
philosophy, which now we call science, for those who 
merely live from hand to mouth without an object or a 
plan, '^ the curvse in terras animse, et coelestium inanes." 
Neither school yield in any degree to the moralist in the 
emphasis with which they brand the mere worldling, or 
by whatever name they distinguish the man who is de- 
voted to nothing, who has no religion and no soul, 
Philistine or hireling or dilettante. Only in the tone 
of their censure there is a certain difference ; the artist, 
except when he rises to the height of a Blake, does not 
get beyond irritation and annoyance \ the philosopher 
smites them with cold sarcasm ; the moralist, or he 
whom in the narrower sense we call religious, assails 
them by turns with solemn denunciation and pathetic 
entreaty. This last alone, when it crosses his mind, 
and he realizes for a moment what is to him so incredi- 
ble, that there are those who " mind earthly things," 
says it " eveii weeping^ 

The modern phase of opinion then does not lead to 
secularity but to new forms of religion, for the systems 
of hfe which spring out of it are based on the ideals of 
Art and Science. Now Art and Science are not secular, 
and it is a fundamental error to call them so ; they have 
the nature of religion. 

* Here is the first practical application of the principles 
which were laid down above. Among the religions of 
the world we distinguish three as enshrining in archaic 
forms principles of eternal value, which may commend 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 121 

themselves to the most rationalistic age. There was the 
religion of visible things, or Paganism, which though 
generally a low type of religion, yet in its classical form 
became the nursing mother of art ; there was the reli- 
gion of humanity in its various forms, of which the most 
conspicuous is Christianity ; lastly, there was the religion 
of God, which worships a unity conceived in one way or 
another as holding the universe together. We found 
that these forms of religion, though theoretically distin- 
guishable, seldom appear in their distinctness, and that 
in particular Christianity, pre-eminently the religion of 
humanity, is yet also a rehgion of Deity. Now if we 
apply these categories to the controversies of our own 
time, we shall say that we see the ancient religion of 
humanity, which has so long reigned among us under 
the name of Christianity, assailed on the one side by the 
Higher Paganism, under the name of Art, and on the 
other side by a peculiarly severe and stern form of 
Theism, under the name of Science. And when we 
look back over the history of the Church we see that it 
has always been struggling with these two rival religions, 
and that the only peculiarity of our own age is the con- 
fident and triumphant manner in which the two enemies 
advance to the attack from opposite sides. 

But whatever may be the merits of this controversy 
(which after all is but a struggle for independence and 
for a frontier, since Christianity has never altogether de- 
nied but only extenuated the claims of Art and Science), 
it is but a rivalry of religions among themselves. Against 
irreligion, against secularity. Art, Science, and Christian- 
ity are or ought to be united. That which opposes 
Christianity is not necessarily irreligion ; it may be an- 



122 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

Other sort of religion. In that case we may think it 
false and mischievous, but religion does not become by 
being false a whit more like irreligion. Nor does its 
opposition to Christianity prove it not to be a rehgion, 
but rather the contrary, as a rival is the bitterest enemy, 
as antipathy is rather between likes than unlikes. False 
religion indeed may in certain cases be worse than secu- 
larity, as in the religious wars of the sixteenth century 
the cynic who cared for neither party, even though his 
indifference sprang from mere sordidness of nature, may 
at times have been less mischievous than the enthusiast. 
But whether worse or better, irreligion is always essen- 
tially and entirely unlike religion, while false and true 
religions are always like each other just so far as they are 
religions. Without some ardent condition of the feel- 
ings rehgion is not to be conceived, and it has been 
defined here as habitual and regulated admiration; if 
the object of such admiration be unworthy we have a 
religion positively bad and false ; if it be not the highest 
object we have an inadequate religion ; but irrehgion 
consists in the absence of such habitual admiration, 
and in a state of the feehngs not ardent, but cold and 
torpid. 

What irreligion or secularity is we can best learn from 
the New Testament, and especially from the Gospels. 
There we see the rise of a fresh rehgious spirit in a 
community, and we see at the same time what is its 
essential opposite. Not any rival conviction, not some 
fresh vigorous impulse crossing the path of the new 
religion, but the want of conviction, the absence of 
impulse. 

The World is described to us there, and what is the 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 123 

World? It is a kind of conspiracy of prejudices, or 
union of all that is stagnant, inert, mechanical, and 
automatic into a coherent tyrannous power and jealous 
consentient opinion. Conventionalism, indeed, is the 
modern name for that which stands here for the oppo- 
site of religion ; and we can judge from this in what 
way religion itself was conceived, for the opposite of 
conventionalism is freshness of feeling, enthusiasm. 

We may observe that in the New Testament Chris- 
tianity is never brought into contact with anything vigor- 
ous or enthusiastic. No artist lost in the worship of 
sensuous beauty crosses the stage, no philosopher con- 
sumed with the thirst for truth. How such characters 
would have been treated by Christianity in its earliest 
days we cannot tell, perhaps with something of repug- 
nance or hostility. But they could never have been 
classed with those whom it actually attacked, the de- 
mure slaves of fashion and convention. They might be 
thought to be addicted to a false or dangerous religion, 
but they could not be called worldlings. Possibly they 
would have been judged with favor, for it accords with 
the fundamental characteristic of the Gospel to extol 
vitality at the expense of propriety — those who love 
much, Magdalens, publicans, prodigals, at the expense 
of those most honored by pubHc opinion. 

Irreligion, then, is life without worship, and the World 
is the collective character of those who do not worship. 
When worship is eliminated from life, what remains? 
There are animal wants to be satisfied, a number of dull 
cravings to be indulged, and paltry fears to be appeased ; 
moreover, because worship is never really quite dead, 
but only feeble, there is some poor convention in place 



124 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

of an ideal, and a few prudish crotchets in place of 
virtues. Yet a society may live on in this condition, 
if political or physical conditions are favorable, without 
falling into any enormous corruptions, and may often in 
its moral statistics contrast favorably with one which 
some great but perverted enthusiasm has hurried into 
evil. Its fault is simply that it has no soul, or to use 
the old BibHcal phrase, has no salt in itself; or again, 
to use the modern German paraphrase, has no soul to 
save the expense of salt. Now it is against this condi- 
tion, against irreHgion pure and simple as distinguished 
from any forms of false religion, that there always has 
been, and is particularly in our own time, a remarkable 
agreement of authorities. 

It may, indeed, often appear that the disregard of 
animal wants and the renunciation of the world preached 
in the New Testament, are exaggerated. Animal wants 
in our northern climates, cares of livelihood since slavery 
was disused, have become more imperious than they 
were in ancient times, and the education of recent cen- 
turies has led us to approve a certain kind and degree of 
worldliness. Even prejudices, social conventions, and 
decorums may no doubt be condemned too unreservedly. 
But granting all this by way of abatement, the general 
truth of the New Testament doctrine is clearer now than 
it has been in many ages (so called) of religious agree- 
ment. There has never been a time when the necessity 
of religion, in the broad sense of the word, has been so 
clear, if there has never been a time when its value in 
the narrow sense has been so much disputed. If, now 
that Art and Science have attained complete indepen- 
dence of the Church, and the monopoly even of moral 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 125 

influence is withdrawn from her by systems of indepen- 
dent morality, secular education and the like, we give the 
name of religion to that confined domain which is still 
left to the Church, it will seem as insignificant as the 
States of the Church have been in our time compared to 
the dominion held by Hildebrand or Innocent. But if 
we understand that all culture alike rests upon religion, 
religion being not simple, but threefold, and consisting of 
that worship of visible things which leads to art, that 
worship of humanity which leads to all moral disciplines,, 
and principally the Christian, and that worship of God 
which is the soul of all philosophy and science ; if we 
recognize, on the other hand, that secularity is the ab- 
sence not of one of these kinds of worship, but of all 
— in other words, that it is the paralysis of the power of 
admiration, and as a consequence, the predominance of 
the animal wants and the substitution of automatic 
custom for living will and intelligence, then we shall 
recognize, that it is not favored but very emphatically 
repudiated by the spirit of the present time. 

If we adopt this principle, that is, if we consider 
morality to be something different from mere decorum, 
and religion to be something different from mere ortho- 
doxy, if we consider the basis of both to be sincerity of 
life, we shall scarcely be so much alarmed as many re- 
ligionists are at the turn which opinion is taking. Who 
that has seen the new generation of scientists at their 
work does not delight in their healthy and manly vigor, 
even when most he feels their iconoclasm to be fanatical ? 
No great harm surely can come in the end from that 
frank victorious ardor ! As for the opposite enthusiasm 
of Art, certainly we cannot honor it with such epithets as 



126 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

frank, manly, vigorous, or healthy ; 2.x\di. yet here too there 
is life, a determination to deal honestly with the question 
of pleasure, to have real enjoyment and of the best kind 
rather than the dull pretence of gladness, the mock- 
pleasure and mock-happiness which so plainly indicate 
something hollow in our well-being. These on the whole 
-are movements which indicate rather revival than de- 
cay, rather life than death. For Art and Science are not 
of the world, though the world may corrupt them ; they 
have the nature of religion. When therefore we see 
them shaking off the fetters of the reigning religion, we 
may be anxious, but we are not to call this an outbreak 
of secularity ; it is the appearance of new forms of re- 
ligion, which if they threaten orthodoxy threaten secu- 
larity quite as much. Now secularity is the English vice, 
and we may rejoice to see it attacked. It ought to be 
the beginning of a new life for England that the heavy 
materialism which has so long weighed upon her is 
shaken at last. We have been perhaps little aware of it, 
as one is usually little aware of the atmosphere one has 
long breathed. We have been aware only of an ener- 
getic industriaHsm. We have been proud of our national 
" self-help," of our industry and solvency, and have taken 
as but the due reward of these virtues our good fortune 
in politics and colonization. W^e have even framed for 
ourselves a sort of Deuteronomic rehgion which is a 
great comfort to us ; it teaches that because we are 
honest and peaceable and industrious, therefore our 
Jehovah gives us wealth in abundance, and our exports 
and imports swell and our debt diminishes and our 
emigrants people half the globe. The creed is too 
primitive ! Ought well-being to be so absolutely con- 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 12/ 

founded with wealth? Is life but a livelihood? We 
may no doubt think ourselves happy, in not being misled, 
like so many nations, by false ideals. On the other hand 
have we any ideal at all ? Does not this eternal question 
of a livelihood keep us at a level from which no ideal is 
visible ? In old biographies we read of high and gen- 
erous feelings, the love of fame, the ambition of great 
achievements, not to speak of higher feelings yet. We 
neither have such feelings nor yet any bitter regret to 
think that we cannot have them. We are too tame for 
either aspirations or regrets, or if we have them we know 
as a matter of course that they cannot be indulged. 
Money must be made first and a good deal of it ; com- 
fort not to say luxury cannot be dispensed with, for 
the very thought of any kind of self-denial is too medie- 
val; then comes pleasure, of which we can scarcely 
have enough. When all these claims are satisfied, the 
balance of our time may be given to our ideal, if we 
have one at all ; we are perhaps aware that so much 
will not suffice, but then we are humble and do not 
even in our dreams expect to accomphsh much. 

Where there is the perception of an ideal we may 
expect to find the sense of a vocation. England surely 
is the country where the largest number of people lead, 
for mere superfluous wealth, a life that they themselves 
despise ; the country where vocations are oftenest de- 
liberately disobeyed or trifled with, where artists oftenest 
paint falsely and literary men write hastily for money, 
and where men born to be philosophers, or scientific 
discoverers, or moral reformers, oftenest end ignomini- 
ously in large practice at the bar. 

Again, where there is the perception of an ideal we 



128 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

may expect to find high and original views of education. 
Children are, as it were, firesh blocks of marble in which 
if we have any ideal we have a new chance of reahzing it 
after we have failed in ourselves. Look, then, ho\y the 
English people treat their children. Try and discover 
from the way they train them, from the education they 
give them, what they wish them to be. They have 
ceased, almost consciously ceased, to have any ideal at 
all. Traces may still be observed of an old ideal not quite 
forgotten : here and there a vague notion of instilling 
hardihood, a really decided wish to teach frankness and 
honesty, and, in a large class, also good manners ; but 
these after all are negative virtues. What do they wish 
their children to aim at ? What pursuits do they desire 
for them ? Except that when they grow up they are to 
make or have a livelihood, and take a satisfactory posi- 
tion in society, and in the meanwhile that it would be 
hard for them not to enjoy themselves heartily, most 
parents would be puzzled to say what they wish- for 
their children. And, whatever they wish, they wish so 
languidly that they entrust the realization of it. almost en- 
tirely to strangers, being themselves, so they say — and in- 
deed the Philistine or irreligious person always is — much 
engaged. The parent, from sheer embarrassment and 
want of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, and it has 
become necessary to set apart a special class for the 
cultivation of parental feelings and duties. The modern 
schoolmaster should change his name, for he has become 
a kind of standing or professional parent. 

The Christian Church, one would think, is here to 
cure all this. It is here, and has by no means lost its 
hold on the community. Wonderful is the effect pro- 



RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 1 29 

duced by any religious utterance which seems to ring 
true. But its system is full of survivals, its text-books 
have been left too long without revision, its teaching is 
so archaic as to be in great part scarcely intelligible 
without the aid of ancient history, while the method of 
tests and exclusions has drained it of intellectual vigor 
and has left it mainly under the control of anxious, 
nerveless minds ; so that it is hardly listened to by men 
of the world except on the ground that Anility and 
Puerility after all are forces, and might do untold mis- 
chief if they were needlessly provoked. The religious 
world, which ought, one would suppose, to cherish the 
high ideal that the community wants, has in fact an 
ideal almost lower than that of the community. It 
applies the rudest standards, such as the Hebrew 
prophets denounced in the infancy of the world. Un- 
blushingly it pronounces a man religious because he 
practises religious observances, figures in religious soci- 
eties, talks much and unctuously about religion. " Thou- 
sands of rams,'^ as the prophet would say, "and ten 
thousands of rivers of oil ! " But real religiousness, 
which, as he tells us, shuns parade, which in fact con- 
sists mainly in a quiet devotion to the sort of work 
which is permanently useful and an infinite solicitude 
to do such work as well as possible, does not pass with 
the religious world for religiousness at all. 

Meanwhile the great writers who, often indifferent or 
hostile to orthodoxy, have been the prophets of the 
present age, have denounced secularity as earnestly as 
the prophets of old time. Insincerity and convention- 
alism have been the objects of their attack, cant in 
religion, dilettantism in art, shams in society, party 

9 



I30 



NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



common-places in politics, in all departments the ty- 
ranny of opinion destroying individuality. But to have 
an individuality is to have an ideal, and to have an ideal 
is to have an object of worship, it is to have a religion. 
Thus it is that modern teaching does but repeat, in 
these days when it is said there is no agreement about 
religion, the maxims which have always made the basis 
of the religion of Christendom — that '^ there is one 
thing needful," and that ^^it shall profit a man nothing 
if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul." 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 131 



CHAPTER II. 

RELIGION AND CULTURE. 

And thus in real life, no less than in speculation, we 
meet with Natural Religion. When we go where the 
Christian tradition has most completely lost its hold, 
where clerical influence is extinct, where to reject 
miracles is a point of honor and the very conception 
of a spiritual world is at least put on one side, we do 
not find that we have left religion behind us. We still 
recognize the feelings, we still hear the peculiar rhetoric, 
of religion. We find men still falling into two classes, 
still struggling over something they treat as infinitely 
important. Among men who profess ahke to be mate- 
rialists one is found excommunicating the other, shrink- 
ing from him with the horror of a Pharisee for a pubU- 
can, and even pitying him with the pity of an apostle 
for a heathen. These feelings not only appear to have 
the nature of religion, but they are in no degree weak 
or faint. On the contrary they are fresh, and easily 
become violent. They by no means appear to be the 
mere survival of an extinct system of religion, but 
seem rather capable* of becoming the germ of a new 
system. 

If then religion is here, working as fully and vigor- 
ously as ever, it follows that we have a religious ques- 



132 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

tion. For in what relation does this rehgion stand 
to our Christianity, to our Churches and religious de- 
nominations ? 

As the religion is at the present time intolerant of 
supernaturalism, it has a difficulty in identifying itself 
with any of the organized systems. In these circum- 
stances a plausible course suggests itself, which is easily 
accepted by most of the more moderate representatives 
of modern free thought. It is said that the substance 
of all religion evidently is morality, — ''he can't be wro?ig 
whose life is in the right,^'' — and that accordingly all we 
have to do is to draw attention principally to the moral 
part of Christianity, sinking the supernatural and myste- 
rious element as much as possible. By this means, it 
is thought, all the substantial uses of rehgion may be 
served; men may learn to love each other; and in 
consideration of this grand point gained a httle supersti- 
tion may be tolerated until the progress of education 
shall have made supernaturalism as incredible to the 
great mass of the people as it is already to the in- 
structed few. 

No doubt it is a plausible view, since there is evi- 
dently a ground of Natural Religion which is common 
to Christian and Sceptic, that here a rehgion might be 
founded which should be influential in modern life and 
yet should avoid the arrogance of calling itself new. 
For it may well seem possible to avoid the burning 
question of miracles, so long as the chief authorities on 
both sides vie with one another in asserting that the 
essence of religion is not in dogma but in something 
else, whether they call it " life " in opposition to " forms 
of creed " or '' charity '* in opposition to knowledge or 



REUGION AND CULTURE. 1 33 

by some other name. But yet in practice the hope is 
always disappointed. The Christians on the one side, 
in spite of the parable of the Good Samaritan, decide 
that after all supernatural dogmas are necessary, and by 
the rationalists too the profession of reverence for re- 
ligion seems to be dropped as soon as it has served its 
purpose. After all it is discovered that by religion 
they did not really mean religion. And so the com- 
promise breaks down, and the irreconcilable quarrel 
between religion and modern thought begins again with 
no other prospect but of the destruction of one or the 
other. 

At this point it is, at this disappointing identification 
of religion with morality, that the breach takes place. 
" Can then religion mean no more than that we should 
pay our debts, keep our engagements, and not be too 
hard on our enemies? For nothing more than this 
have so many temples been built, so many psalms been 
sung, so many penitents retired from the world, so 
many saints and prophets wrestled with their own souls, 
so many martyrs sacrificed their lives? Would that 
invisible choir be satisfied now with the fruit of its labors 
could it but see mankind made moral, the planet inhab- 
ited by well-behaved people with their passions under 
control, leading intelligent and reasonable lives ? And 
this result once attained, would the world be absolved 
from all religious duties for the future ? Will the civil- 
ized community of the future, furnished with the school 
and the press, see the euthanasia of religion in the old 
sense, and look back upon its historic splendors as on 
the mere transient sunrise of a calm day?" 

We have entered here upon another road. In the 



134 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

residuum left after the elimination of miracle we have 
seen no mere morality, but something which has all the 
greatness and sublimity of the old religion. Not moral- 
ity, but worship ; not an influence dormant so long as 
no temptation arises, helping us only in our work and 
deserting us in our leisure, but a principle of life pos- 
sessing the whole imagination and heart. 

According to the view here taken too much is said 
by modern rationalists of morality and too little of art 
and science, since these are related no less closely to 
religion and must be taken with morality to make up 
the higher life. This view indeed regards the very word 
morality and the way of thinking which leads to a fre- 
quent use of the word with the same sort of impatience 
which the Pauline writings show towards the law. In 
any description of an ideal community which might be 
given in accordance with this view not much stress 
would be laid on its moral purity. This would rather 
be taken for granted as the natural result of the healthy 
working of the higher life. The pecuHarity most strongly 
marked would be rather that what we call genius would 
be of ordinary occurrence in such a community. Every 
one there would be alive. The cares of livehhood would 
not absorb the mind, taming all impulse, clogging all 
flight, depressing the spirit with a base anxiety, smother- 
ing all social intercourse with languid fatigue, destroying 
men's interest in each other and making friendship im- 
possible. Every one would worship, that is, every one 
would have some object of habitual contemplation, 
which would make hfe rich and bright to him, and of 
which he would think and speak with ardor. Every one 
would have some supreme interest, to which he would 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. I35 

be proud to sacrifice every kind of pelf, and by which 
he would be bound in the highest kind of friendship to 
those who shared it. The Higher Life in all hearts 
would be as a soil out of which many fair growths would 
spring ; morality would be one of these ; but it would 
appear in a form so fresh that no such name would seem 
appropriate to it. 

In history we meet with examples of such Natural 
Religion. Nations have sometimes their moment when 
this Higher Life grows so strong in them that it breaks 
out in visible manifestations, so that they do original 
and immortal things, and after times look back fondly 
upon the Golden Age, hoping to revive it by imitation 
and commentatorship. But in history this appears as 
"a spirit which bloweth where it listeth,'* and no one has 
inquired upon what causes its awakening may depend. 
Nevertheless this is the problem of those who discuss 
Natural Religion. 

In order to arrive at this view we begin by denying the 
position that the essential part of all religion is morality. 
Instead of this we lay it down that there is indeed a kind 
of religion which is intimately connected with morality, 
but that there are also other kinds which manifest them- 
selves in quite other ways and yet are truly religions, 
essential to the higher life of man. From such a prop- 
osition it will follow that the plan of insisting mainly on 
the moral part of Christianity is insufficient and does 
not meet the wants of the age. For the age calls not 
merely for a revival of the essential spirit of Christianity, 
though this too is needed, but for new elements of 
religion which, though not opposed to Christianity, are 
yet scarcely to be discovered in it. We shall see this 



136 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

if we pursue the line of thought to which the last chapter 
introduced us, and examine more closely that spirit of 
opposition to secular! ty which we see awakening around 
us. In this opposition there is much which does not 
seem to have been inspired by Christianity. And as it 
develops and organizes itself, we do not see it assume 
the name of Christianity, nor even of religion at all ; it 
prefers to call itself culture. 

What is this new thing "■ culture," and what relation 
does it bear to the old familiar thing '' religion " ? If we 
might judge by the utterances of its adherents it is not 
dissimilar nor unfriendly to religion, but somehow more 
enlightened and modern, so that it speaks another dia- 
lect even when it would express the same truths. More- 
over it is understood to be much more comprehensive, 
and in fact to deal principally with matters of a different 
kind. It is concerned more with art and science than 
with self-sacrifice or i:harity. 

This view might be coiTCCt if rehgion were identical 
with ecclesiastical Christianity. But if we take a larger 
and juster view of religion, it will not seem to us less 
enhghtened or less comprehensive than culture, or in- 
deed different from it in any way. It will seem to be 
merely the alias which the Natural Religion of the mod- 
em world has adopted, being forbidden by orthodoxy to 
use the name that properly belongs to it. For it is a 
general rule that the orthodox system has kept to itself 
the vocabulary of belief and has thus forced all other 
systems to appear as non-religious, if not irreligious. 
These systems themselves too, soured by opposition, 
have taken some pleasure in avoiding the old phrases ; 
which, though in themselves natural and poetic, had lost 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. I 37 

their, charm, had been stiffened by too much definition, 
cheapened by too much use, worn by too much contro- 
versy. New phrases therefore have been coined even 
for notions borrowed from the rehgious tradition. Thus 
it was that at the very moment when men began to dare 
to call themselves Atheists they began to use the lan- 
guage of religious worship towards Nature. Poets were 
inspired with hymns in praise of Nature, philosophers 
began to study Nature with a new kind of ardor and 
devotion ; and in course of time through this new wor- 
ship the old Hebrew sublimity returned to poetry, the 
old Hebrew indignation at anthropomorphism showed 
itself in science ; and still it was long — so completely 
was the phraseology of worship pre-occupied by the 
Church — before it was understood that these feelings 
were really, and not in mere metaphor, worship ; long, 
too, before the object of this worship was perceived to 
be none other than He who was worshipped from the 
beginning, the ancient God, ^^ our dwelling-place in all 
generations." About the same time, too, when men 
began to confess their repugnance to theology, their 
contempt for a science so unprogressive and so quarrel- 
some, they began, on the other hand, to imagine the 
possibility of drawing a rule for human life from the new 
and vast views of the universe that were opening with 
the progress of science ; but still they called theology 
their enemy, and did not perceive that to aim at such 
a new synthesis was to aim at reviving theology. Once 
more it is worth noticing how from the beginning of the 
period of denial the word Humanity has haunted men 
almost as much as the word Nature ; and all this while 
they have pursued Christianity as an enemy upon whose 



138 . NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

destruction they were bent, refusing to see that the wor- 
ship of humanity is as truly the revival of specific New 
Testament Christianity as the scientific view of the uni- 
verse is the revival of the austere Jewish theism. 

On the same principle Religion has been revived 
under the aitificial name of Culture. 

Thus instead of saying that the substance of religion 
is morality and the effect of it moral goodness wq lay 
it down that the substance of religion is culture and 
the fruit of it the higher life. And it is in the growth 
of the doctrine and theory of culture in the modem 
world rather than in any mere signs of reviving activity 
in religious bodies that we see the true revival of religion 
and the true antidote of secularity. 

Not that the word is a good one. It is a misfortune 
that those who now say ^^ culture " do not say ^^ religion." 
The word religion makes us think of feelings, emotions 
and convictions or the acts which flow immediately out 
of these, but the word culture suggests rather the ma- 
chinery of training, art-schools, academies, universities. 
Culture is properly a direction given to the development 
of life, but religion is the principle of life itself. Now 
it is not by any system of training but only by a princi- 
ple of hfe that secularity can be resisted. Culture again 
is a word which seems to describe the privilege of a 
favored few, and yet to withstand secularity we need 
a mighty, popular force. Nothing perhaps could con- 
tribute so much to mislead the rising religious movement 
of the modern world as such a name, which seems to 
condemn it beforehand to formahty, exclusiveness and 
pedantry. The very word brings before the mind every- 
thing that belongs to the school, the cKque, the exclusive 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 



139 



profession, in fact all those evils of excessive organization 
under which religion has always suffered. 

But though the name is unfortunate, the thing realizes 
precisely that large conception of religion after which we 
have been feeling. For culture is not " mere morality/' 
but embraces a larger field, while it nevertheless includes 
morality. If we look at the history of the modern theory 
of culture we shall perceive that its characteristic feature 
is precisely the assertion of the religious dignity of Art 
and Science. That German Gospel which the Puritan 
Carlyle preached to us with a solemnity which seemed 
scarcely appropriate to it, was an assertion of Beauty 
and Truth as deserving to be worshipped along with 
Duty. Goethe and Schiller habitually apply the lan- 
guage of religion to Art, and in the whole school which 
they represent may be traced an impulse to create a 
new organization for the worship of Beauty and Truth, 
worships omitted, as they held, in Christianity. They 
turn their backs on the church and study to make the 
theatre and the university into centres of the higher life. 
And yet it is quite ahen to their way of thinking to 
undervalue moral goodness, or even to treat the Church, 
so far as it is the organ of moral influence, with any hos- 
tility. In their minds Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are 
of one family ; only they oppose the puritanism which 
sets Goodness at an unapproachable height above its 
sisters and they are disposed rather to give the highest 
place to Beauty. 

Their view was probably extreme so far as it was the 
result of a reaction. But their fundamental conception, 
to which they gave the name of Culture, is of a three- 
fold religion such as has been set forth here. Culture 



140 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

is summed up by Goethe in the formula, Life in the 
Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful. Here Morality, 
under the name of Life in the Good, stands between 
Art, which is Life in the Beautiful, and Science, or the 
knowledge of the law of the universe, which is Life in 
the Whole. 

When one religion is set up against another there 
begin controversies and embarrassments. But when the 
principle of all religion is compared with the opposite 
principle, when the life inspired by admiration and de- 
votion is compared with the Hfe that begins and ends in 
mere acquisition, then there is no controversy at all 
among those whose opinions are valuable. Looked at 
so, religion is seen to be entirely beyond dispute and to 
be only another name for the higher life, the life of the 
soul. When on the scene of history religion appears in 
some partial, one-sided form, it often works mischiev- 
ously j again and again a drop of it falling at a critical 
moment into the cauldron of political or social strife has 
caused the most terrible combustion. It has been easy 
for philosophers preaching on the text tanhim religio 
potuit, &c., to make out religion itself a mischievous 
principle and that it ought to be a main object to 
moderate, if we cannot hope to kill, this unfortunate 
propensity in human nature. But almost everything 
else that is highest in man might be looked at in the 
same way. Nothing troubles social life so much as 
originality, or political life so much as the spirit of 
liberty. Of these intractable forces the greatest by far 
is religion. If only it could be extinguished ! In that 
case we might picture the human family entering upon 
the happiness which has no history, beginning a career 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. I4I 

chequered by nothing that could be called incident, and 
varied only by the gradations of progress, a career the 
annals of which would consist only of the ever improv- 
ing statistics of production and enjoyment; in short, 
" feeding like horses when you hear them feed ! " But 
indeed such a consummation would be only a kind of 
euljianasia of human nature. It is precisely these im- 
pulses and emotions which are so hard to control that 
give dignity and worth to life. It is for their sakes that 
we produce and consume. And so it is a more hopeful 
course to consider whether those sinister workings of 
the higher Hfe may not be as happily prevented by 
.giving it a full and harmonious development as by 
vainly trying to extinguish it. 

The position taken up in this chapter is that ecclesias- 
tical Christianity has a certain onesidedness, which has 
made it oppressive to other forms of religion and has 
provoked them to a rebellion which may look like a 
rebellion against religion itself; but that by the side of 
the rebellion there has been a constructive effort, so that 
we have now under the name of culture a system which, 
however imperfect in other respects, is free from such 
onesidedness, and reconciles the three elements which 
have hitherto done so much mischief by their discord. 

These three forms of religion have a sort of cor- 
respondence to the three stages of human life. The 
Higher Paganism may be called the childhood of the 
higher life, and so when continued too long and not 
duly subordinated, it is the childishness and frivolity 
of it. Primitive Christianity is its youth, its phase of 
enthusiasm and unbounded faith both in man and the 
universe ; this, too, if it stands too much alone, degrades 



142 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

into se-ntimentalism. Science is the later phase, when 
reality is firmly faced, when the sombre greatness of the 
law under which we live, and at the same time the limita- 
tions it imposes on us and the patience it requires from 
us are manfully confessed ; but this also taken alone is no 
more than the cynical old age of the higher life. For it 
is essential to its completeness not only to have acquired 
what comes latest, but also to retain and not to lose 
what came earlier. Humanity must constantly renew 
its childhood and its youth as well as advance in experi- 
ence. At the same time that it observes and reasons 
with scientific rigor, it must learn to hope with Christian 
enthusiasm, and also to enjoy with Pagan freshness. 

How different does Paganism look when we contem- 
plate it in the age of Pericles, or that of Scipio, when 
it began to be quietly left behind, and again in the 
days of the final triumph of Christianity when it was 
aggi-essively destroyed ! In the one case we see with 
contempt its childish absurdity ; in the other we mark 
with some regret its freshness and brightness. In the 
great Athenian age a few artists still with studied con- 
servatism cling to it ; and we may indeed observe that 
when this is no longer possible the great imaginative 
poets come no more ; but to the majority of intelligent 
men it has become a mass of absurdity no more credi- 
ble than Brahminism to the young Bengal of to-day. 
With still more decisive contempt do the strong prosaic 
intellects of Rome put aside and utterly forget their old 
Itahan rehgion. All this seems to us, when we read of 
it, neither avoidable nor to be regrettable ; what was 
absurd could not but appear to be so sooner or later. 
But when, after many centuries, the Revolution has 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 1 43 

gone much further ; when the Church has rooted out of 
the minds of the common people what then only 
dropped quietly out of the belief of philosophers ; when 
the temples of the gods are thrown down and their 
names held abominable ; when a completely new page 
of history begins, and all such ways of thinking are 
decisively left behind, some sort of revulsion takes place 
in our feeHngs. The new world appears too monastic, 
too much tormented with conscience, not spontaneous 
or natural enough. We delight to see the old Pagan 
fire break out sometimes in Caedmon, and are inclined 
to wish it had free way, and that there were no Chris- 
tianity near to smother it. How much we prize what 
glimpses we can get of those old beliefs ; how much 
it disappoints us when the writings of those times are 
silent about them, and give us instead merely Christian- 
ity and monotonous lives of saints ! In some cases we 
are disposed to complain even that the native genius of 
a nation has been killed by the foreign faith, when we 
find a literature, after perhaps a promising commence- 
ment, paralyzed for long ages by ecclesiastical influence. 
Then it is that we see the other side of Paganism, and 
what before appeared childish we are now disposed 
rather to describe as childlike. We are struck now by 
the free zest and relish of the world that went to the 
making of those frivolous creeds ; here and there per- 
haps we see in them the rudiments of a true philoso- 
phy. We are angry that this vigorous play of mind 
should be brought to an end, and that not by a truer 
philosophy of nature, but by a timid morality which 
looks only within, and is afraid to philosophize on 
nature at all. In fact, we have just the same feelings 



144 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

as when in an individual we see childhood come to an 
end, and the merry, boisterous boy turned into the awk- 
ward, perhaps self-conscious and sickly youth. 

Hence the reaction which steadily and more or less 
secretly has for so many centuries gone on under the 
name of Renaissance, It is analogous to the growth 
in cheerfulness and healthy worldliness which comes to 
the youth as he grows accustomed to manhood. The 
self-conscious youth of humanity was long and trying. 
Its Pagan childhood was artificially prolonged till it was 
more like dotage than childhood, and when the new- 
feelings of self-sacrifice, duty, enthusiasm came, instead 
of quietly controlling and modifying the old feelings, 
they began a violent war against them. One extreme 
was substituted for another — for the Pagan view of Hfe, 
the Christian view heightened by monasticism. The 
renunciation of selfishness was violent in proportion to 
the intensity with which it had been indulged; the 
world was hated as much as it had been loved; the 
extremes of self-devotion were explored with the eager- 
ness natural to a first discovery. These excesses are 
outlived in time, and youth ripens into manhood by 
recovering something of the child. And thus the Re- 
naissance is not merely the revival of ancient arts, the 
adoption of ancient models, it is the revival in proper 
degree and subordination of the ancient religion. It is 
the restoration of the worship of the forms of nature. 
This worship returns, purified, of course, from all mix- 
ture of delusion, purified from superstition, and, what is 
still more important, subordinated duly to other wor- 
ships infinitely higher and more solemn, but none the 
less a worship, an admiration which may become- un- 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 1 45 

bounded in degree and rise to ecstasy, and which is 
essential to the healthy vigor of the higher life. 

But manhood differs from youth, not merely in having 
recovered something which youth had parted with, but 
also in having gained something unknown both to youth 
and childhood. Beyond the forms of nature and the 
ideal of moral goodness there remains another discovery 
to be made, the recognition of a Law in the universe 
stronger than ourselves and different from ourselves, and 
refusing to us not only the indulgence of our desires but 
also, as we learn slowly and with painful astonishment, 
the complete realization of our ideals. It is not in the 
time when we are forming those ideals that it is possible 
for us to recognize the limitation imposed by Nature 
upon the fulfilment of them, and yet until we can make 
the recognition we shall be liable to constant mistake 
and disappointment. The special advantage of man- 
hood over youth lies in this recognition, in the sense of 
reality and limitation. Youth is fantastic and Utopian 
compared to manhood, as it is melancholy compared 
both to manhood and childhood. Here again the par- 
allel holds between primitive Christianity and youth. 
Nothing can be more mistaken than the comparison 
made by some of those who have regretted Paganism 
(Schiller, for instance, in The Gods of Greece), between 
the melancholy of Christianity and the melancholy which 
is the mark of old age. Most evidently all that has 
been morbid in Christian views of the world has resem- 
bled the sickliness of early youth rather than the decay 
of age. Old age is subject to cynical melancholy, early 
youth to fantastic melancholy, and assuredly it is the 
latter rather than the former that has shown itself in 



146 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

Christianity. All the faults that have ever been reason- 
ably charged against the practical working of Christian- 
ity (apart from those arising from faulty organization) 
are the faults which in the individual we recognize as 
the faults of youth, a melancholy view of Hfe, in morals 
a disposition to think rather of purity than of justice, but 
principally an intolerance of all hmitation either in hope 
or behef. ^^ All things are possible to him that believ- 
eth," is a glorious formula of philanthropic heroism ; the 
mistake of the Church, as the mistake of young men, 
is to treat it as literally and prosaically true. 

Another maxim has to be learned in time, that some 
things are impossible, and to master this is to enter upon 
the manhood of the higher life. But it ought not to be 
mastered as a mere depressing negation, but rather as a 
new religion. The law that is independent of us and 
that conditions all our activity is not to be reluctantly 
acknowledged, but studied \\dth absorbing delight and 
awe. At the moment when our own self-consciousness 
is liveliest, when our own behefs, hopes, and purposes 
are most precious to us, we are to acknowledge that the 
universe is greater than ourselves, and that our wills are 
weak compared with the law that governs it, and our 
purposes futile except so far as they are in agreement 
with that law. 

This assuredly is the transition which the world is now 
making. It is throwing off at once the melancholy and 
the unmeasured imaginations of youth ; it is recovering, 
as manhood does, something of the glee of childhood 
and adding to that a new sense of reality. Its return to 
childhood is called Renaissance, its acquisition of the 
sense of reality is called Science. We may be glad of 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 1 47 

both. Science will save us from those heroic mistakes 
of which the Catholic centuries were so fruitful, from 
unworldliness ending on the one hand in squalor and 
pestilence, on the other in greedy mendicancy, from 
pity creating pauperism, and chastity by reaction pro- 
moting vice. Re7taissance will redeem the lower levels 
of life from the bald barrenness of money-getting, and 
give Humanity the fond gaillard that may carry her 
through the trials in store for her. We may take sides 
firmly with the modern world against the Syllabus, 
against all unfortunate attempts to preserve a justly- 
cherished ideal by denying and repudiating reality, to 
protect against all subsequent modification the first sub- 
lime exaggerations of the newborn spirit of self-^sacrifice, 
to banish criticism because it is cold, and phil(5sophy 
because it is calm, and to try and give the feelings of 
youth the one thing precisely which is most foreign to 
them — infallibiHty and unchanging permanence. 

Nevertheless, the analogy that we have been pursuing 
will suggest to us that the victory of the modern spirit 
would be fatal if pressed too far, as indeed it is essentially 
a melancholy triumph, and that the youth of humanity, 
crushed out too ruthlessly, would have a still more irresisti- 
ble Renaissance than its childhood. The sense of reality 
gives new force when it comes in to correct the vague- 
ness of our ideals ; this is manhood ; but when it takes 
the place or destroys the charm of them, this is the 
feebleness of old age. Healthy manhood must continue 
to savor of its youth as of its infancy, to be enthusiastic 
and tender as well as to be buoyant. It must continue 
to hope much and believe much ; we praise caution and 
coolness in a youth, but a few stages on these qualities 



148 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

cease to seem admirable, and the man begins to be 
praised for the opposite qualities, for ardor, for enthusi- 
asm, in short for being still capable of that of which 
youth is only too capable. But in the individual we re- 
gard this persistent vitality as only possible for a time. 
Old age sets in at last, when, if enthusiasm still survive, 
it is not so much a merit as a kind of prodigy. Is 
Humanity to verify the analogy in this respect also? 
When we have learnt to recognize the limitations im- 
posed on us, that we cannot have everything as our 
enthusiasm would make it, and that if our ideals are to 
be realized in any considerable measure it must be by 
taking honest account of the conditions of possibility ; 
when we have gone so far, are we to advance another 
step and confess that the conditions of possibility are so 
rigorous that most of our ideals must be given up, and 
that in fact humanity has little to hope or to wish for? 
It need not be so if, as was said above, the service of 
Necessity may become freedom instead of bondage, if 
the Power above us which so often checks our impa- 
tience and pours contempt on our enthusiasms can be 
conceived as not necessarily giving less than we hope for 
because it does not give precisely what we hope for, 
but perhaps even as giving infinitely more. On this 
hypothesis humanity may preserve the vigor of its man- 
hood. Otherwise, if reality, when we acquire the power 
of distinguishing it, turns out not merely different from 
what we expect but much below what we expect; if 
this universe, so vast and glorious in itself, proves in rela- 
tion to the satisfaction of our desires narrow and ill- 
furnished, if it disappoints not only our particular wishes 
but the very faculty of wishing by furnishing no sufficient 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. I49 

food, then humanity has also its necessary old age. And 
if its old age, then surely that which Hes beyond old age. 
We must not merely give up the immortality of the indi- 
vidual soul — which some have persuaded themselves 
they can afford to give up — but we must learn to think 
of humanity itself as mortal. We must abandon our- 
selves to Pessimism. 



ISO 



NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



CHAPTER III. 

NATURAL CHRISTL\NITY. 

The religious movement of the modem world has 
been exhibited here as in great part independent of 
Christianity. But are we not to look forward also to a 
revival of the essential part of Christianity ? May we not 
hope to see a religion arise which shall appeal to the 
sense of duty as forcibly, preach righteousness and truth, 
justice and mercy as solemnly and as exclusively as 
Christianity itself does, only so as not to shock modern 
views of the Universe ? 

This question has hitherto been intentionally avoided. 
The truth is that if we would bring out the idea of re- 
ligion as such, we must take some pains to look away 
from Christianity. We cannot find what religion is in 
itself by contemplating a single religion exclusively, for 
we cannot abstract from a single case. And yet much is 
written in these days about the essential nature of re- 
ligion, about what it must be to be religion at all, which 
clearly betrays that no religion but Christianity has been 
thought worthy of a moment's attention. Hence what 
is peculiar to Christianity among religions is mistakenly 
transferred to religion as such. Hence also — and this is 
more to the present purpose — a wrong notion is formed 
of what constitutes Christianity a religion. 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 151 

All concrete religions, Christianity included, are com- 
posed of much beside religion. We have seen the 
essence of religion in worship, and the fruits springing 
most naturally out of it we have held to be art, science, 
and morality. But morality, if connected on one side 
with religion, is on another just as closely connected 
with law. In concrete religions, which reflect for the 
most part primitive, rudimentary, undifferentiated ideas, 
law, morality, and religion are blended inextricably to- 
gether. Hence mistakes may easily be made in the 
attempt to draw from such religions a conception of 
religion in the abstract. 

We know that Christianity, like many other religions, 
has upheld morality by a system of rewards and pun- 
ishments supposed to be administered by an invisible 
Judge. But in doing so it has acted not as a religion but 
as a law. 

Undoubtedly much of the power of Christianity under 
the reign of supernaturalism was derived from the super- 
natural law-court, as Dante's poem, the very culminating 
point of Christianity in literature, is sufficient to prove. 
Nor did this power begin at once to decline with the 
belief in the miraculous revelation. The Deism of the 
last century retained rewards and punishments, and Vol- 
taire himself, as his friends complained, could not rid 
himself of the belief in a Dieu remunerateur-vengeur^ 
that God whom, if he did not exist " it would be neces- 
sary to invent." Nor again is this legal view of the 
Universe at all peculiar to Christianity among religions. 
The invisible King or Judge seems almost a necessary part 
of religion, though in some systems he is regarded as ruling 
and judging in time and on earth rather than in a remote 



152 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

eternity, and in some too he judges rather the nation or 
tribe than the individual. Everywhere too the doctrine 
is most effective, if it be not absolutely indispensable, 
during a certain phase of development. The moral 
education of societies has perhaps been mainly con- 
ducted by means of this artificial extension of law. In 
primitive times, it may be, almost all virtue depended 
upon the dread of a Judge who could neither be de- 
ceived nor corrupted, and who punished the individ- 
ual with lightning and the community with plague or 
famine. 

Religion in its concrete form being thus usually 
blended with a supernatural law, the supernatural law 
is easily taken for the essence of religion. It is sup- 
posed that religion comes in simply to supply the sanc- 
tions of morality. Christianity is often spoken of as a 
kind of theologia civilis, or useful popular system en- 
shrining the substance of morality in the half-mythical, 
poetical form which recommends it to the multitude, 
furnishing in short the necessary fiction without which 
the popular mind could never pass from the idea of legal 
to that of moral obligation. 

But it is not in this form that Christianity is likely 
just now to have a revival, since this is not Natural but 
Supernatural Christianity. For it is a secondary form 
of supematuralism when we suppose an invisible world 
wholly separate from the visible one and so give up the 
present life to nature while we reserve another life for 
God. Natural Religion to suit the present phase of 
thought must be wholly different from any Deism of 
the eighteenth century ; it must contemplate its God 
mainly in Nature and not mainly beyond it. God in 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. I 53 

Nature is indeed very really a Judge, for human laws 
are evidently a sort of reflection of eternal laws inherent 
in the Universe, which have their own ways of vindi- 
cating themselves. But the future heaven and the future 
hell are reduced by this way of thinking to probabilities 
not strong enough to drive Hfe into a course which it 
would not have taken without them. 

The hope of a future Hfe is still strong in men's minds 
and has perhaps been expressed with more ardor in this 
age than in any other. But the legal and penal ideas 
which used to be connected with it have almost disap- 
peared. " In Memoriam " speaks in every line of a future 
state, but of a future judgment it is absolutely silent. In 
these circumstances religion ceases to act as a supernat- 
ural law. We should consider it in these days a mark 
of low cultivation, if any one avowed that he only kept 
his engagements from fear of hell-fire. Thus it is with 
a start of surprise at the change of thought which has 
taken place in little more than a century that we read 
Benjamin Franklin's description of the effect which the 
scepticism of his time produced upon himself, as a 
young man, and upon his friends. With religion, he 
tells us, morahty gave way at once, even to common 
honesty and common decency, and it was only after 
much reflection that he began to suspect that wrong 
was not wrong because it was forbidden, but had been 
forbidden because it was wrong. Such legal ideas now 
seem archaic, and the example teaches us to realize — 
what is now half forgotten — how potent the supernat- 
ural law once was, and that not so long ago, and upon 
the shrewdest and most independent minds. 

If this be so, if Christianity no longer enforces moral- 



154 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

ity by those overwhelming ^dsions of a future judgment, 
the question will be asked " What remains of Christianity 
beyond mere morality itself ? What else can remain, 
unless it be a few majestic discourses of the ancient 
Prophet who first taught the nations of the West to 
reverence universal morality?" 

It is time then to apply to Christianity the larger con- 
ception of religion which has been expounded here at 
so much length. Religion according to this is not prop- 
erly a supernatural lav/ ; it is worship. Natural Religion 
is simply worship of whatever in the known Universe 
appears worthy of worship. As to the practical utility 
and function of religion, we find that it supplies all the 
vitality of the higher life, or in other words that what- 
ever in human activity is free, magnanimous, or elevated 
rests upon feelings of admiration or warm unselfish in- 
terest. We have dwelt upon the religion which is con- 
cealed under the name of culture and which hes at the 
basis of all art and science. But now is there not simi- 
larly a religion hidden under morality, and may not this 
moral rehgion be called Natural Christianity? 

Conventionalism is in all departments the opposite of 
religion. Accordingly where religion is wanting all the 
higher activities of man are conducted in a conventional 
or lifeless, mechanical manner. This is true in art or in 
science ; it is true not less in morality. 

Every one knows how subtle, and yet how all-impor- 
tant in works of art is genuine artistic quality. In every 
art the distinction is felt — and the critic has scarcely 
anything to do but to point it out — between work that 
is merely clever or briUiant and work that is really artis- 
tic. The difference, every earnest critic protests, is like 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. I 55 

that between light and darkness, almost like that between 
right and wrong. It is the ^^ one thing needful/' this 
genuineness ; work in which it is found has value ; other 
work has no right to exist, and had better be destroyed. 
A distinction which affects every single performance nat- 
urally appears with the utmost prominence in the history 
of art. Whole schools, whole periods are found to have 
lost the inestimable secret, and therefore to have left 
nothing behind that has permanent value ; other schools 
and periods, in spite of great faults, are nevertheless 
found to possess the secret. At times not only is the 
secret lost, but the very tradition of it is lost too ; it is 
denied that such a secret exists ; and the question is 
argued with great warmth in the critical world. 

In such a controversy the watchword of one side is 
"rules ; " that of the other is "nature," or "genius," or 
"inspiration." Yet those who withstand the appeal to 
rules, and deny the authority of the rules cited against 
them do not, when they are wise, deny that in good 
works of art certain fixed rules will be found to be ob- 
served. But they maintain that rules are liable to con- 
tinual change, and that only principles are invariable, or 
in other words that genius makes its own rules ; or again 
that the only rule is to follow nature. When die causes 
of this difference of view are examined, it is found that 
the party of rules take a far less exalted view of art than 
their opponents, that they think of it as a sort of game 
of skill which is in itself unimportant, but must be played 
according to the rules or not at all, while the others set 
no bounds to their estimate of its dignity, and habitually 
speak of the pursuit of it as a religion, and of skill in it 
as priesthood or inspii'ation. This is the fundamental 



156 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

controversy of art. In the eighteenth century it was 
brought into close connection with the religious contro- 
versy by the fact that the same man took the lead in 
both disputes. Voltaire was as much bent on maintain- 
ing the dramatic unities and the bienseances of literature 
as he was bent on humbling the Church. In the two 
controversies he had very opposite fortune. While the 
Church and the ecclesiastical Christianity of the time 
seemed almost helpless under his assaults, he saw his 
opponents in criticism constantly gaining upon him and 
the renown of Shakespeare looming nearer and nearer. 
Before his death the word " genius " had been passed 
in Germany, and "rules" and "unities" had become 
names of ridicule. Nor has the tide turned since. Fifty 
years later the opposite principles prevailed in his own 
country, and it is now felt to be impossible to revive with 
any real success the names of the poets, so illustrious a 
century ago, who wrote under the system of rules. And 
yet in those days Frederick could say, " A dispassionate 
judge will acknowledge that the He?iriade is superior to 
the poems of Homer ! " 

But now does not the history of morals run parallel 
to that of art? Do we not find the same debate raging 
here too ? nay, do we not find the same debate equally 
prominent in the history of the subject? Are there not in 
the department of morals also rules, unities, bie?isea7tces, 
and is there not a party which can see nothing beyond ? 
Is there not here too a genius party, which speaks 
sometimes of "nature," sometimes of "the heart," and 
which is distinguished from the other party by a profes- 
sion of greater earnestness or solemnity in their view of 
the subject, and by habitually using the word "religion," 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. I 57 

and with it the whole vocabulary of religion ? This use 
of words is called metaphorical so long as the essence 
of religion is supposed to lie in supernaturalism. It 
becomes literal when religion is defined as here. The 
religion spoken of in art becomes the Higher Paganism. 
What is the corresponding religion which stands related 
to conduct or morality as this religion is related to art? 

How does Addison's Cato differ from King Lear 1 
Cato is blameless in the observance of certain rules and 
decencies — rules of grammar, rhetoric, and metre, 
decencies of the drawing-room ; the merit of Lear 
springs out of a prodigious activity of imaginative and 
sympathetic contemplation. Poetry then, it seems, 
may be of two totally different kinds ; it may be pro- 
duced in a comparatively languid state of the faculties 
by almost automatic repetition of what has been written 
by others ; it may also appear with strangely new char- 
acteristics and only resembling what has been produced 
before so far as it is poetry, through an intense observa- 
tion and assimilation of something in nature. To the 
eye of the true critic the difference between the two 
sorts is infinite ; the latter sort he calls real and pre- 
cious, the former he passes by with indifference ; and 
yet both are called poetry, both have excited admira- 
tion, nay, it was, in this case, the hollow production 
which was hailed with the loudest approval. 

Life too, like the drama, may be conducted accord- 
ing to rules ; it may also be conducted on the method 
of free inspiration, in which case also rules will be 
observed, but the rules will be different, less stereotyped, 
adapting themselves more readily to new circumstances, 
and moreover they will be observed instinctively and 



158 NATURAL RELIGION .APPLIED. 

not felt as a constraint. And though this latter method 
may easily be abused, though the inspiration may in 
particular cases be feigned or forced, though individuals 
may pervert the method to a loose antinomianism in 
morals, as in art it has often been made the excuse of 
formlessness or extravagance ; yet it remains the true 
method, the only one which keeps morahty alive and 
prevents it from becoming a prim convention — the 
only system, in short, under which moral Shakespeares 
can flourish. 

But in what precisely does the difference between the 
two methods consist? In this, that the one founds 
morality on religion, and the other does not. For if 
religion be that higher life of man which is sustained 
by admiration, if its essence be worship or some kind 
of enthusiastic contemplation seeking for expression in 
outward acts, then we shall say of morality that, it is 
founded on religion if it arise out of enthusiastic con- 
templation ; and in like manner we shall call art reli- 
gious, if it have a similar origin. Now the point of 
close resemblance between the genius school in art and 
the anti-legal school in morals is precisely this, that both 
consist of worshippers, both elevate their minds by 
habitual admiration. Enough has been said of the 
worship which lies at the root of genuine art. It is not 
in empty metaphor that the true artist affects so much 
the language of religion. The loving devotion with 
which he traces the forms of nature has all the charac- 
ter, and is attended by all the emotions, of religion ; 
historically. Art has come down to us from the tem- 
ples of Greece almost as much as morahty from the 
temple of Jerusalem ; and when the true artist stands 




NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 



159 



out in contrast to the mere craftsman who makes 
works of art by rule, he is distinguished by nothing so 
plainly as by the religious feeling which he mingles 
with his artistic industry. But let us now consider the 
religion that lies also at the root of all free morality. 

The morality that simply keeps on the windy side of 
the law has evidently no religion at the bottom of it, 
but rests merely on prudence. If the constraining force 
be not literally law, but something of equivalent effect, 
such as a social opinion or expectation, the morality 
that results will be of the same kind. It must be of 
the same kind too if the law is transferred to the super- 
natural region ; the rehgion that wields those supernatu- 
ral terrors is not properly called rehgion ; it is but law 
turning speculative or transcendental. With such mo- 
rahty the higher hfe is not in any way concerned ; but 
only that lower life whose objects are wealth, safety, 
prosperity. The higher life begins when something is 
worshipped, when some object of enthusiastic contem- 
plation is before the soul. The fighting of a Wilham 
Tell differs from that of a mercenary in this, that the 
hero has his country present to his mind and his heroic 
actions are of the nature of sacrifices offered to that 
object of his religion. And as martial heroism, so every 
virtue may take two shapes, the one lower and the other 
higher ; for every virtue may spring from calculation, 
and on the other hand every act of virtue may be a 
religious act arising out of some worship or devotion of 
the soul. 

But now it is not every religion that prompts to vir- 
tuous action, for, as we have said so often, one kind of 
religion bears fruit in works of art. As virtue can only 



l60 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

show itself in our relations to our fellow-men, the reli- 
gion that leads to virtue must be a religion that worships 
men. If in God Himself we did not beheve qualities 
analogous to the human to exist, the worship of Him 
would not lead to virtue ; the worship of God not as 
we believe Him, but as we see Him in non-human 
nature, would be likely, taken by itself, to lead to piti- 
less 'fanaticism. 

The two great moral religions of the world, Chris- 
tianity and Buddhism, agree in this, that both centre in 
the worship of a Man. The truth is that all virtue 
which is genuine and vital springs out of the worship 
of Man in some form. Wherever the higher morality 
shows itself. Humanity is worshipped. It is worshipped 
under the form of country, or of ancestors, or of heroes, 
or great men, or saints, or virgins, or in individual lives, 
under the form of a friend, or mother, or wife, or any 
object of admiration, who, once seizing the heart, made 
all humanity seem sacred, and turned all deahngs with 
men into a religious service. It is worshipped most of 
all when, passing by an act of faith beyond all that we 
can know, we attribute all the perfections of ideal 
humanity to the Power that made and sustains the 
universe. 

The entanglement of these two wholly distinct con- 
ceptions of moral religion, that of a supernatural law 
and that of a worship of Man, is pecuHarly obstinate 
and difficult to unravel. The truth is that the two 
views are the more easily confused because to a certain 
extent they agree. According to both views religion is 
a popular thing, meant for the multitude and not merely 
for a few philosophers. The rules and prohibitions of 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. l6l 

morality, taken by themselves, are ineffective, but heaven 
and hell all can understand. And in like manner all 
can be made to understand goodness when it is pre- 
sented living and lovely, as an object of worship. The 
two views also are curiously interwoven together in the 
system of Catholicism. When we try to explain the 
fascination which that system exerts, we say : ^^ Catholi- 
cism is definite, has real dogmas from which it does not 
flinch j it exalts and satisfies the soul, which the cold 
and prosaic Protestant or rationalistic systems leave 
untouched.^* This is the language used, but it confuses 
together two perfectly distinct advantages which Ca- 
tholicism happens to unite. Catholicism is powerful no 
doubt because it does not explain away heaven and 
hell ; but its warmth, its poetic charm, have nothing to 
do with the inflexibihty of its dogmas. These are owing 
to something else. They are the reward of the firmness 
with which it clings to the true idea of a religion, 
basing its moral discipline upon true worship, enthu- 
siastic and intimate contemplation of ideals of saintly 
humanity. 

There is then a religion at the basis of all true moral- 
ity, and we can conceive such a religion taking definite 
shape and becoming organized. Is this a true account 
of Christianity, or ought we rather to regard Christianity 
as being a religion only in the other sense, that is, as a 
supernatural law? 

Catholicism is both together, and both in a very high 
degree ; this is the secret of its ascendency, because with 
the one aspect it attracts tender and poetical spirits, and 
with the other it overawes rude ones. It is true that 
Catholicism has elements which are not to be found in 



1 62 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

the original Christianity, for it is specifically the religion 
of the Roman Empire and may be said to spring from 
a marriage between Rome and Jerusalem. But if it 
be at once worship and law, we may presume that the 
feature it derives from Rome is its legality. 

Mr. Mill refers with a touch of sarcasm to those who 
fancy the Bible is all one book. It is a great mistake to 
do so ; but it is perhaps a still greater mistake to think 
that it is 7iot one book, or that it has no unity. The 
writings of which it is composed, allowing a few excep- 
tions, agree together and differ from most other books 
in certain characteristics. Certain large matters are 
always in question,, and the action moves forward with 
a slow evolution, like the denoicement of a play, through 
a thousand years of history. The Founder of the Chris- 
tian Church believed his work to be the completion of 
the long history of his race, and therefore if we can 
grasp successfully the kernel of the Bible, if we can dis- 
tinguish that with which the Bible from first to last is 
principally concerned, we shall stand a good chance of 
distinguishing that wliich is the substance of Christianity, 
according to the original intention of its Founder. 

Now what in the main is the subject of the Bible? 
Nine people out of ten, reading it with all the prepos- 
sessions of later Christianity, would say, '' It is the book 
of heaven and hell, the book which teaches the littleness 
of this life and the greatness of the life to come. Other 
books are secular, they tell us about the visible world 
and our temporal life ; the Bible tells us of the other 
world and of an eternal Hfe." But is this really such a 
statement as w^ould be given by any one who read the 
book for the first time, and with an unprejudiced mind? 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 1 63 

Let us consider. The Bible contains the history of a 
tribe that grew into a nation, of its conquest of a par- 
ticular country, of the institutions which it created for 
itself, and of its fortunes through several centuries.' 
Through all these centuries we hear httle of heaven 
and hell. A divine revelation is said to be given to this 
nation; but it is a revelation which is silent about a 
future state. The conspicuous characters of many gen- 
erations pass before us ; to all appearance they do not 
diifer from similar characters in other nations by having 
a stronger belief in a future state. Their hopes are for 
their descendants, for the future of their country, rather 
than for themselves ; occasionally they speak as if they 
actually beheved in nothing after death. Then we pass 
from the historical to the religious ^vritings of this race, 
the hymns of their temple, the discourses of their proph- 
ets. Here, too, we do not soon meet with any clear 
references to a future state. The imagination of this 
people apparently does not care to deal with the mys- 
teries of another Hfe. Such labored pictures of the state 
of the dead and the rewards and punishments meted out 
to them as we find in Homer, Plato, Virgil, are entirely 
absent from the literature of the Hebrews. Not indeed 
that the belief in rewards and punishments is wanting. 
The rehgion of the Bible in its earlier form is, like most 
primitive religions, inextricably confused with law ; nay, 
it continues so a long time, and no fuller statement of a 
theologia civilis than the Book of Deuteronomy can any- 
where be found. But it is observable in the first place that 
the rewards and punishments contemplated are all purely 
temporal, and in the next place that as time advances 
this view of religion instead of being more and more 



164 NATURAI. RELIGION APPLIED. 

firmly announced is called in question, and at length 
seems to be in a manner abandoned. It is admitted 
that the bad prosper at times, and that the good at times 
suffer, whether it be for trial of their virtue or to atone 
for the sins of others. 

In the latter parts of the book the notion of a future 
state begins to appear ; it creeps in silently, and seems 
to subsist for a time in the state of an admissible specu- 
lation ; then in the New Testament it prevails and be- 
comes part of the teaching of the book. But to the 
end of the Bible there are to be found no such heaven 
and hell as are put before us in Dante ; the \vriters do 
not fix their attention as he does upon a future state. 
A few mysterious affirmations about it suffice them. 
We find no descriptions, no labor of the prophetic im- 
agination upon the state of the dead. This is the more 
to be noted because it is characteristic of the Biblical 
WTiters both in the New and Old Testaments, that they 
occupy themselves especially with the future. The 
future is their study, but not — this is almost as true of 
the New Testament as of the Old — not the future after 
death. It is a kind of political future that absorbs 
them, the fall of kingdoms and tyrants, of Babylon, 
Epiphanes, Nero, and the Roman Empire, the future 
of Jerusalem, the expected return of Christ to reign 
upon the earth. 

The popular notion, then, which makes the Bible a 
sort of Book of the Dead destroys its unity. Isolated 
passages in the New Testament may be quoted to sup- 
port such a view; but it is not a view which brings 
together the earlier and later books of the Bible, so as 
to make them seem parts of the same whole. Only by 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 1 65 

desperate shifts of interpretation can the Old Testament, 
on this theory, be made to lead up to the New. To 
those who think the present life a dream and the fu- 
ture life alone worth consideration, the Old Testament 
prophets, absorbed in their Jerusalem and its future, 
and careless to all appearance of their own future, can 
scarcely seem edifying writers, and their religion must 
seem not merely immature, but founded on a radically 
wrong principle. 

Thus, if religion be a supernatural law, the Bible is 
not the religious book par excellence it is commonly 
supposed to be. On the other hand, if we take the 
other view of religion which has been presented here, 
we shall find that of this religion the Bible is the text- 
book as no other book is or can be. Do we want an 
idea which shall give unity to the Bible, which shall 
make Old Testament and New and the separate writ- 
ings composing both seem — in the main and roughly, 
for more is not to be expected — to belong together 
and to make up a great whole? Just as clearly as the 
idea of a future life is not this, the idea of morality 
inspired and vivified by religion in the manner above 
described is this. The idea of a future life is one 
which we ourselves read into the Bible ; the idea which 
we find there, pervading it from first to last, is one 
which belongs altogether to practical life, and which 
must seem just as important to the sceptic as to the 
most believing supernaturalist ; it is the idea summed 
up in an antithesis which takes many forms, the an- 
tithesis of letter and spirit, law and grace, works and 
faith. 

When we consider human action, whether theoreti- 



1 66 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

cally or historically, we are always brought back to this 
fundamental antithesis. Human action is either mechan- 
ical or mtelligent, either conventional or rational. Either 
it follows custom or reason, either it is guided by rules or 
by inspiration. In morals as in poetry you must be of 
the school either of Boileau or of Shakespeare. Either 
you must sedulously observe a number of regulations you 
do not hope to understand, or you must move freely 
towards an end you passionately conceive, at times 
making new rules for yourself, at times rejecting old ones, 
and allowing to convention only a kind of provisional 
or presumptive vahdity. The greatness of the Bible, its 
title to be called the 'Book par excellence lies in this, that 
it grasps firmly this fundamental antithesis, expounds 
and illustrates it exhaustively through a history of many 
centuries, and leaves it in the act of revolutionizing the 
world. It thus becomes the unique Epic of Human 
Action, the Book of Dead and Living Morality. 

We associate this controversy of works and faith prin- 
cipally with the name of St. Paul and with that last 
chapter of the Biblical history in which a national creed 
was generalized, so as to be capable of becoming the re- 
ligion of the Roman Empire. But in reality the fifth act 
of the drama does not differ from the earher acts, for 
the drama is one. That earher rebelhon against the 
authority of Scribes and Pharisees was, from the present 
point of view, another aspect of the same controversy. 
It was parallel to those transitions in literature or art 
w^hen the commentatorial spirit is renounced, when free 
inspiration moves again, the yoke of authority is broken, 
and new leaders assert their equality or superiority to the 
most venerated names of the past. So too of the pro- 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 1 6/ 

phetic movement of the old Monarchy. It is an effort 
to put life into a mass of usages and ceremonies. Stat- 
utes, ordinances, ceremonies, are brooded on till the 
mind of the lawgiver is thought to be discerned in them. 
Then when the system has been in this manner verified 
a principle of progress begins to work, new obligations 
are discovered, new statutes seem to issue from the in- 
visible Source of authority, until morality is set free from 
law and begins to be independent of rewards and 
punishments. Nor is the subject handled in a one-sided 
or fanatical spirit. It is recognized not only that the 
stereotyped letter is valuable, not only that it is to be pro- 
tected at any sacrifice against foreign admixtures, and 
guarded with watchful zeal against neglect, but it is also 
admitted, even by the leading champions of freedom, that 
there is a period or stage of national life when law is 
predominant, that the law is a pedagogue, and the like. 
And thus die transition, in which Ezra takes the lead, is 
in favor of the most punctilious legality, and a long 
period follows, in which the commentatorial spirit rules, 
and the stream of inspiration runs shallower, until it dries 
up altogether. 

When a great number of documents in different styles 
and of different periods are presented to a reader as one 
book, nothing is more natural than that he should miss 
the clue to such a book, and find it difficult to distinguish 
what is episodical or accidental in it from what belongs 
to the main subject. Thus some readers of the Bible 
fix upon its revelations of a future state, and overlook 
the striking silence about a future state which most of 
the Bibhcal books preserve ; others fix upon its miracles, 
though it is easy to quote from the New Testament pas- 



1 68 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

sages in which the evidence of miracles is spoken of 
slightingly. Sceptics deny that the Bible has any unity 
at all, and no doubt we cannot without assuming a 
miracle think to discover in the Bible the same degree of 
unity as in a single treatise. But each genuine national 
literature, compared with other literatures, has a certain 
unity, and in Israel national consciousness was intense. 
What we find, if we read without prepossession, is pre- 
cisely what we should expect. We find a history of the 
nation much more intense and ideal than other histories, 
in which therefore the fundamental lesson of history is 
more successfully brought out, in which it is shown 
how law disciplines those who are subject to it, until, 
after a long course of generations, there springs up a 
morality which is free, active, and energetic, because it 
is founded upon the religion of ideal humanity. 

We find then no *^ mere morality," but a historical re- 
ligion with its classical literature. The influence of the 
Greek. and Latin classics is not now less than it was, per- 
haps it is even greater; and. yet criticism has cancelled 
some centuries of the history of Greece and Rome as 
untrustworthy, and has denied the personality of Homer, 
while the authority of Aristotle has been long since re- 
nounced in the schools and in the theatre, new sciences 
and literatures have sprung up, and the last traces of 
the Roman Empire have disappeared from the system 
of Europe. Just as indestructible by criticism or changes 
of opinion will the influence of the Hebrew classics 
prove ; and that which is peculiar to the Bible, and 
has caused it to be spoken of as one book rather than 
many, viz., the unity reigning through a work upon 
which so many generations labored, gives it a vast- 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 1 69 

ness beyond comparison, so that the greatest work of 
individual Kterary genius shows by the side of it like 
some building of human hands beside the Peak of 
Teneriffe. 

There are some now living who after passing through 
all the religious perplexities of their age, after doubting 
whatever can be doubted, all that the Churches call 
orthodoxy and all the supernatural claims that have been 
made for the Bible, yet believe in the Bible more than 
ever. They brood on it much more, they learn from it 
much more, than they did while they were afraid to 
suffer their minds to play upon its contents. Nor do 
they regard it merely as a historic document, valuable 
for the light it throws on the growth of religious ideas 
but obsolete as a practical manual. They find in it 
the same intense vitahty as in some Greek books, the 
vitaHty breathed from one of the small antique states. 
They find the old Jewish society in its hunger for 
righteousness going deeper into the secrets of practi- 
cal ethics than the modern world goes, just as they 
find the modern world surpassed by Athens and Flor- 
ence in the sense for art. 

It is thus that we arrive at a Christianity which is 
independent of supernaturalism but at the same time is 
historic not abstract, and does not in any way break 
with the Christian tradition or discard the Christian 
documents as obsolete. The miracles of the Bible, if 
the world should ultimately decide to reject them, would 
fall away, and in doing so would undoubtedly damage 
the orthodox system. But the Natural Christianity 
sketched in this chapter would not be damaged. They 
would damacfe also the Bible considered as a Koran or 



I JO yATCRAL RELIGION .^JPPLIED. 

Sibylline Book, but as a classical literature and a his- 
tory of the religion hidden under morality it would not 
be damaged, as the legendary- element in the Greek 
literature does not diminish but perhaps rather enhances 
its value. 

Let us not however blink the fact that classical books 
too may be abused. Thus we may sincerely acknowl- 
edge the inestimable benefit that comes fi-om the kind 
of consecration which the Greek and Latin writers have 
received, and yet we may hold that the study of the 
classics keeps artificially alive a great deal of obsolete 
sentiment It is not ever}* reader of an ancient book 
that can make the proper allowance for the lapse of 
two thousand years. This drawback, we ought to admit, 
is more serious in the case of the Bible than in that of 
the Greek and Latin classics in proportion as the Bible 
is more tmiversally circulated and takes a stronger hold. 
The reader takes ever}^ word as addressed to himself, 
whereas the first condition of understanding it rightiy is 
to be ahve to the fact that it was addressed to wholly 
different people Kving in a different period of history. 
Hence the wildest mistakes are made, and in every 
countr}' in wliich the Bible is universally read a large 
proportion of the people is a prey to dangerous hallu- 
cinations which sometimes disfigure the page even of 
public histor}-, as in the chapter of our Commonwealth. 

^Moreover the Bible is a fi-agment and standing alone 
creates an illusion which has incalculable bad results. 
The grand ideal narrative by stopping short suddenly 
conveys an impression as if revelation itself had ceased 
and the world had since Hved under a different and less 
divine law. Or if a later generation attempt, like the 



NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. I7I 

Puritans, to rise once more to the same general view of 
human affairs, they fail, because they have no clue to 
the centuries immediately behind them, of which no 
Bible has been written. 

If the struggle between two sorts of morality recorded 
there be really so fundamental and universal' wherever 
human beings pretend to any morahty as we have rep- 
resented it, evidently the record ought to be continued 
so as to embrace modern times. It ought to be related 
how the free morality, after being successfully revealed 
to the world, became the religion of races which were so 
far from being ripe for it, that they were but just ready 
for the legal stage ; and how of necessity a new system 
of Christian legalism arose which reigned for centuries ; 
how, after disciplining a barbarian world, this system, 
so powerful, though so radically self-contradictory, gave 
way, and the language of St. Paul about faith and liberty 
began to be intelligible again; how the tyranny of a 
church gave place to the less intolerable tyranny of a 
book, while the nations were preparing themselves to 
take up once again the freedom of those who live not by 
rules but by religion, the religion of ideal humanity. 



172 NATURAL RELIGION APPUED. 



CHAPTER IV. 

NATURAL RELIGION AND THE STATE. 

Natural Religion then is no mere dull morality, for 
in the first place it is far \nder than any morality, being 
as wide as modem culture, and in the second place so far 
as it is moral and bears fruit in morality, even here it 
is no mere moraht}^, but a historic rehgion of humanity. 
A true religious Hfe then — so much perhaps has been 
sho^^TL to be possible without aid from supernaturalism. 
But a new objection makes itself heard. ''Possible to 
whom ? To a few elect spirits more finely gifted than 
the average of mankind, or to a few fortunate people 
lifted above common cares and rich enough to indulge 
in spiritual luxuries ? But rehgion in the proper sense is 
no such delicate thing. Either it is one of the great 
forces which sway whole communities at once, or it is 
nothing. We may speak with all respect of those refined 
systems which find an adherent here and there among 
the thoughtful few, but we should call them philosophy 
rather than religion. And of this kind is every variety 
of rationalism, every system of belief which excludes the 
supernatural. In their place such systems may be re- 
spectable, but they wear a disguise when they present 
themselves in the character of religion." 

In the ecclesiastical world Natural Religion is com- 
monly hooted down with a confused clamor of Mere 




RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 73 

morality ! Mere philosophy ! as though these two con- 
temptuous epithets had much the same meaning. But 
there is a great difference between them. The charge 
of Mere morality ! has been examined, but it remains 
to meet those who cry Mere philosophy ! Natural Re- 
ligion may be much more than a mere morality, it may 
satisfy and elevate the soul as no dead morahty can do, 
but it may lack nevertheless all popular power, it may 
be a mere philosophy, incurably cold and incomprehen- 
sible to the mass of mankind. 

It is said that the theophilanthropist Larevellere- 
Lepeaux once confided to Talleyrand his disappointment 
at the ill-success of his attempt to bring into vogue a 
sort of improved Christianity, a benevolent rationalism 
which he had invented to meet the wants of a sceptical 
age. " His propaganda made no way,'' he said, " what 
was he to do? " he asked. The ex-bishop politely con- 
doled with him, feared it was indeed a difficult task to 
found a new religion, more difficult than could be im- 
agined, so difficult that he hardly knew what to advise ! 
" Still " — so he went oi> after a moment's reflection — 
*^ there is one plan which you might at least try ; I 
should recommend you to be crucified and to rise again 
the third day."" 

Yes, indeed ! this is a lightning- flash that clears the 
air. It reminds us what religion was in the days when 
religion was strong, what a robust unmistakable thing, 
and how helplessly languid are these modern imitations 
of it. It shows us how they strike a statesman who has 
been accustomed to respect the old genuine religion and 
to make Concordats with it, but perceives at once that 
the modern religion will never demand a Concordat. 



174 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

The great religions of the world have been mighty 
social and political forces. Often, as has been said 
above, they have been but law under a disguise ; in 
these cases naturally they have been closely connected 
with the organization of states. It has been laid down 
here that in the sense of a supernatural law rehgion is 
not hkely to revive in the modern world. The question 
now is whether it follows from this admission that re- 
ligion is henceforth to have no commanding influence 
upon society at large or upon public affairs. 

Before we inquire whether Natural Religion may be 
expected to show this kind of commanding power, it 
will be necessary to ask ourselves whether we should 
desire it to do so. For indeed though we are in general 
disposed to respect religion and to regret the decline of 
it, yet we have in our minds a mild and somewhat feeble 
type. A strong religion, when it is clearly put before 
us, causes us to shrink back with alarm. Something 
more, no doubt, than a mere philosophy, some sort of 
Church we are prepared to expect — for surely every 
variety of religious opinion must have its organized soci- 
ety, the most isolated schismatic must at least have his 
congregation — but we are equally convinced that it is 
the first duty of a Church to be humble, modest, rather 
insignificant, to pretend to no public character, to 
shrink with a kind of horror from all connection with 
politics. "Rehgion," so runs the maxim, "is an affair 
between man and his Maker." The modern view is 
that the State is the legitimate authority, to which alone 
belongs the right of exacting obedience, but that under 
the shield of the State, wholly separate from it and 
regarded by it with cold impartiality, there may prop- 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 75 

erly exist modest societies in which those who hold 
common opinions on moral and religious subjects may 
meet for edification. This is a practical view, the result 
of much bitter experience of the excesses into which 
concrete rehgions have fallen when they have had un- 
controlled power. The maxim that " religion is an aftair 
between man and his Maker" has assuredly done a 
world of good, and it has also an impressive sound. 

But is it true ? For it seems almost easier to believe 
that religion is a mischievous thing than that it is a good 
thing and yet requires to be so carefully diluted. Does 
history exhibit religion as such a secondary influence, 
as rendering such very humble unobtrusive services to 
mankind ? 

We may think so as long as we follow what is the 
received method in rehgious discussion, treating Chris- 
tianity as the only religion worthy of notice, and every 
other religion as simply a hateful imposture. For this 
method confines our view absolutely to the history of 
the Christian Church. It teaches us for instance to put 
aside without the least hesitation the example of com- 
plete union of Church and State presented by Judaism, 
and never even to recollect other examples presented by 
heathen forms of religion. In Christian history taken 
alone we do not to be sure find the weight of evidence 
decidedly in favor of the modern view. On the con- 
trary for twelve centuries out of eighteen the Christian 
Church was in close connection with the European 
States, and in those centuries in which Christianity ap- 
pears to the historian most mighty and beneficent, when 
she was gathering barbarous nations into the fold of 
civilization, the Church eclipsed and tended to absorb 



176 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

the State. But this serious fact is supposed to be out- 
weighed by the agreement of the latest and most civilized 
with the earliest and purest ages of Christianity in favor 
of a more retiring kind of religion. The primitive 
Church was a modest society in the bosom of an im- 
perious State, and such has the modern Church since 
the eighteenth century under the light of civilization and 
science tended once more to become. 

This consideration in itself seems hardly conclusive. 
The twelve theocratic centuries of Christianity may be 
thought to show its essential character more truly than 
either those which came before or those which have 
followed, because they offered fewer obstacles to its de- 
velopment. If in the first ages its sphere was narrow, 
this was evidently because it had not yet bulk and sub- 
stance enough for a larger one ; it assumed power as 
soon as it was able to do so. Nor did it begin to aban- 
don this power again until it had become weakened by 
division, for the plan of relegating religion to the private 
sphere did not begin to be adopted till the Reformation 
had introduced two Christianities where there had been 
but one before. 

But if we look beyond Christianity and form our idea 
of religion by a comparison of the different forms it has 
assumed, we shall be much more struck by its social 
character and the organizing power which it exerts wher- 
ever it is powerful at all. Nay more, we shall find that 
the contrast we make between Church and State, as if 
they were two independent and rival organizations, is 
scarcely historical and is founded upon a very special 
experience. History does not confirm the notion that 
men form one organization for secular purposes and an- 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 



177 



other for spiritual union and that these two organizations 
afterwards enter into rivalry. Rather it shows us religion 
as the principal influence by which men are organized 
in the communities which afterwards ripen into states. 
Alliance and still more rivalry between Church and State 
are late and accidental developments ; in the ordinary 
case the human community may be called almost in- 
differently by the name State or Church, though in the 
earliest periods the name Church and in the latest . the 
name State seems usually most appropriate. Nor is this 
purely a primitive phase of society, interesting only to 
students ; nor again does it seem so clear that in civilized 
times it necessarily gives place to a wholly different phase, 
in which the State is supreme and purely secular, but 
allows the existence of modest and insignificant religious 
associations. 

That primitive phase itself it is easy for us all to realize 
because we know by heart the hymns of the old Jewish 
religion. We can measure the intimate union of Church 
and State in Israel by remarking the religious character 
which belongs in that literature to such words as Jerusa- 
lem and Zion. The name of a City there suggests not so 
much law-courts, or even a king's palace, as the home of 
a God. To us it would be startling if the name England 
were introduced in our hymns or sung in our churches. 
What should we think then if its name and its glories 
formed the staple of our religious worship, if our church- 
goers sang — *' Oh pray for the peace of England — 
they shall prosper that love thee. God is in the midst 

of her, she shall not be moved Walk about — and 

go round about her and tell the towers thereof, 

For this God is our God for ever and ever " — ? But it 



178 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

may be answered by one party that Jerusalem really was 
a sacred place but that England is not, and by an oppo- 
site school that the Jews were fanatics w^hose devotion to 
their own institutions caused their ow^n ruin and misled 
the world. Let us go then to the home of philosophy 
and art, to Athens. Do we suppose that Church and 
State were separated there, that the patriotism of the 
heroes of Marathon and Salamis was a purely secular 
feeling, that they were inspired not by feelings of religion 
but by rational considerations of the indispensable value 
of democracy to mankind? Fortunately the voice of 
one of the generation of the MapaOo^voixa^ai is still heard 
among mankind. To Aeschylus Athens is the place 
where Athena comes to sit personally in judgment and 
preside over the balloting of the jurors, where the Eu- 
menides have been pi;opitiated and condescend to live 
among the citizens in their sacred cavern. Not less in 
the mind of Sophocles are religion and patriotism indis- 
tinguishably blended. In his ideal picture of Athens 
w^hich breathes such an exquisite tenderness it is not 
institutions, new improvements or the like, that he 
dwells on, but the presence of Gods. Titan Prometheus 
*^ has " one district ; the neighboring fields look up to 
the horseman Colonus, and the whole is watched by the 
ever-seeing orb of Morian Jove and by Athena. Athena ! 
yes, the Athenian scarcely knows whether he is named 
after his goddess or his City ; when his mind dwells 
upon Athens, it dwells first and principally upon the 
Power w^hich makes its abode there. 

All this no doubt is primitive in its form ; but are we 
right when we imagine that a new kind of religion wholly 
different and of an essentially personal and private char- 



I 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 



179 



acter has since been introduced ? Is it true that whereas 
the ancient rehgions including the Jewish were closely 
connected with public and national life, Christianity is 
different in kind, being purely of the nature of a philoso- 
phy and intended only as a guide to the individual 
conscience ? It has no doubt occasionally taken this char- 
acter, but all religions alike must do so in certain adverse 
circumstances. The homogeneous community which is 
State and Church at once may cease to be possible. 
This will happen for instance when such communities 
are blended or confused together by conquest, as in the 
Roman Empire ; it will happen again, as in modern 
Europe, when the natural unforced consent of opinion 
which the old religions required has been destroyed by 
schism and scepticism. Then will appear the phenom- 
enon of private religion, scarcely distinguishable from 
philosophy but capable of being represented as pure and 
innocent just because it is weak. It does not appear 
that Christianity has ever wished or consented, except 
under constraint, to be such a religion. Its nature is 
misrepresented when it is reduced to a set of philosophi- 
cal or quasi-philosophical opinions, its history is mis- 
represented when it is described as a quiet spiritual 
influence, wholly removed from the turmoil of public 
disturbances, and spreading invisibly from heart to heart. 
Its rise and success are closely connected with great 
political revolutions. It springs up in the bosom of a 
primitive state-church or church-state; its birth-throes 
are like a nationality movement, like the beginning of a 
war of liberation, so much so that its Founder is charged 
with rebellion. Its eadiest controversy concerns the 
question of nationality ; not opinions or dogmas but the 



l80 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

acceptance of the badge of a particular nation, this is the 
first test we hear of in the history of Christianity. And 
when we take a broad view of the gradual rise of this 
religion to universal dominion we do not find it making 
its way after the fashion of a scientific discovery, but 
we see it taking advantage of peculiar circumstances in 
the composition of the Roman Empire. One of these 
circumstances was the wide diffusion of the Jewish 
nationality, which helped the new doctrine into notice 
everywhere at once. Another was the hopeless decay 
of Roman religion and the difficulty of holding the 
Empire together without the help of a great spiritual 
force. For in spite of the striking ability with which 
the Roman administrators applied the conception of 
a purely secular system which should be only a State 
and should contain Churches without being a Church, the 
experiment did not in the end succeed. The Roman 
Empire became in its turn by the acceptance of Chris- 
•tianity, what ancient Israel and ancient Athens had been, 
a city of God. Most instructive is it to trace the process 
by which amid the terrible storms of the fifth century 
this change was thoroughly consolidated, the curious 
compromise between the Roman Empire and the Chris- 
tian Church by which Rome became the sacred centre of 
a religion which had at the beginning regarded Rome 
with abhorrence, the strange composite religion which 
was made by blending Christian ideas with Roman 
maxims so as to oppose to the inroad of barbarism the 
essence of ancient civilization concentrated into a creed. 
The final result was the Holy Roman Empire, a Charles 
crowned by the Church, and standing forth in the atti- 
tude of David as the head of a European theocracy. 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. l8l 

Thus the first great experiment of a purely secular 
State had failed. After this men lived once more for 
centuries in one of those spiritual fabrics which are State 
and Church alike, and this time on a vast universal scale. 
Then in its turn the theocradc Roman Empire decayed, 
though even now it remains the most conspicuous fact 
about the Christian Church that the name of the world- 
state Rome is stamped upon the largest branch of it. 
But the Roman Church stands there isolated and scarcely 
intelligible to the modern world because it has lost the 
Roman Empire to which it belongs. States founded on 
a different principle, national States, have arisen on the 
territory of the universal State, and the national States in 
their turn strove for a long time to be Cities of God. 
In the seventeenth century Scotland reproduced all the 
characteristics and accustomed itself to the phrases of 
the Jewish theocracy, and the world saw again a cov- 
enanted people. 

Even the French Revolution conceived religion as 
public. It made two experiments in religion. At first 
the church was to be Christian and GalHcan. This was 
the aim of the Constitution Civile. When the times 
grew wilder Christianity was renounced, but the idea of a 
national religion, some worship of the Supreme Being or 
the Country, grounded on the theocratic views of Rous- 
seau, lingered in the French mind. Since then however 
we have witnessed a powerful revival of the secular State, 
as it was seen in the earlier Roman Empire, and nothing 
henceforth can be more unlikely than any revival of the 
old type of pubhc religion. But what was that old type ? 
For we are to remember that religion may be conceived 
either as a law or as a worship. Now it is as a law that 



1 82 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

public religion is declining ; not only have the punish- 
ments of a future state lost much of their deterrent in- 
fluence, but '^ courts Christian " in this hfe, the whole 
machinery of religious law, everything that connects 
religion as such with the magistrate, is in the course of 
being exploded. 

But religion in the other sense remains. In this sense 
may it not continue to be pubhc and all-embracing? Or 
must we needs allow religion to be lost in the crowd of 
tenable opinions and to become a mere philosophy ? The 
advocates of the secular state and the private religion 
are unwilling to acknowledge that they do this. They 
point to the primitive Church, and they argue that their 
voluntary churches are no more Hke mere philosophic 
schools than the voluntary independent churches of 
Corinth and Ephesus were like the philosophic schools 
that may have flourished beside these. That age, they 
tell us, was the purest age of the Church ; we can desire 
nothing better than to restore it. Let Truth confide in 
her own weapons ; she will certainly prevail. 

Prevail ! yes, but when once she has prevailed, this 
state of things, wdiich is evidently a state of unstable 
equilibrium, must pass away. The age of Constantine 
must come for Truth sooner or later, though a new Con- 
stantine will use new machinery. Truth must sooner or 
later be in some sense established, though by no means 
in the old sense. 

The modern imitation of the primitive Church is un- 
like its model in this that it does not seriously expect to 
triumph. It sees the ancient legal churches decline, but 
it sees their place taken not by the voluntary churches 
but by secularity or No Church. Between this and 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 83 

the waning powers of the past the sects or private 
religions occupy a modest position. They win small 
triumphs, but no one supposes that the future belongs 
to them. Their field of influence seems strictly limited. 
They speak of freedom of thought, of the right of private 
judgment, but they see with anxiety that private judg- 
ment is inclined in these days to reject supernaturalism, 
and without supernaturalism they know no way of dis- 
tinguishing themselves from schools of '^ mere philos- 
ophy." The primitive Church defied and vanquished 
philosophy; its modern imitation retires before it. It 
parts with one mystery after another in compliance with 
the spirit of the age, but parts insensibly at the same 
time with all character and distinct tendency, as a river 
broadening towards its mouth ceases to be a river and 
to have an onward movement just when the banks that 
confined it fall away on either side. 

For us the question is whether, if the present tendency 
prevails and supernaturalism dies out in established and 
voluntary churches alike, there will remain the materials 
out of which a church in the public sense, that is, a 
great an<^ commanding union of hearts and minds, can 
be formeS^. Or must it be admitted that Natural Re- 
ligion, wl\atever may be its other advantages, cannot 
hold a church together? 

Let us remark that though those ancient religions 
which had such a mighty authority rested usually upon 
the belief in a divine intervention, the intervention was 
not in quite all cases supernatural. Among the most 
powerful of those religions has been Mohammedanism, 
and yet Mohammed professed to perform no miracles. 
Here then is an example of Natural Religion which 



184 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

nevertheless has been no mere philosophy. And if 
miracles may be dispensed with we may conceive that 
even the name of God may be dispensed with provided 
the reality which answers to that name is not wanting. 
That Eternal Law of the Universe which has been 
treated here as equivalent to God might form the basis 
of a great religion if only it revealed itself by evidence 
as convincing to the modern mind as that of miracles 
was to the mind of antiquity. 

When men say '^ mere philosophy '' they mean some- 
thing arguable, something deniable. Now the case is 
altered when philosophy changes its name and becomes 
science. No one says ^^mere science." 

The God in whom the modern world believes has also 
his Revelation. The solid methods by which truth is 
separated from mere opinion and science winnowed out 
of philosophy open a new fountain of prophecy, and 
give once more a public, authoritative character to truth. 

Private judgment is the cry which has been used 
with success against the ancient churches. It has been 
declared absurd to expect agreement of opinion in large 
multitudes of men. Each individual, it is said, thinks 
as he cannot help thinking, and that will not be as his 
neighbor thinks — quot homines tot sente7itiae. This 
principle must no doubt be fatal to churches — as it 
must be fatal to all co-operation for high purposes 
among men. If against churches it has been successful, 
the reason is that as a matter of fact their dogmas had 
come to seem only questionable opinions and by no 
means certain truths. Now properly speaking it is not a 
questionable opinion, but an unquestionable one which 
a church guards ; it is an opinion in which a community 



* RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 85 

lives and which it breathes as its atmosphere, an opinion 
or way of viewing the universe which makes the com- 
munity to be a community and gives it the power to 
rule itself and make laws for itself. That the dogmas of 
modern churches are not of this kind is most true, but 
it is most false that there has never been such an un- 
questionable opinion, wholly different from mere philos- 
ophy, and it is false also that there will never be such an 
opinion again. 

• Is it true that the modern world has and can have no 
such unquestioned universal opinion? The answer will 
be " Not upon religious or theological questions. On 
other subjects there may be agreement, more perhaps 
than in former periods ; but upon these questions we 
see only increasing disagreement or increasing despair. 
Among active minds there is either individual belief and 
solitary worship, or else there is a reasoned opinion that 
no theology is' possible and that religion is obsolete." It 
has been urged here that this current view proceeds 
upon an utterly loose definition, both of religion and of 
theology, and that it is only true of particular religions 
and theologies framed on the received ecclesiastical pat- 
tern. It has been urged that a new theology and a new 
religion have grown up unobserved outside the ecclesi- 
astical sphere. But is this new system a " mere philoso- 
phy"? in other words is jt a mere limited influence 
capable at the utmost only of organizing a new sect, or 
is it one of those great prevalent ways of thinking in 
which whole generations walk, one of those great atmos- 
pheres of thought and feeling which embrace whole 
lands and continents and furnish the breath of life to 
vast populations? If it is the latter rather than the for- 



I 86 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

mer, and if it rests on evidence which though not super- 
natural has equal cogency to the modern mind, then the 
new religion is a religion in the old, grand, pubHc sense 
of the word. 

Let us look again for a moment at that old, once 
universally accepted, idea of religion. Surely in recent 
times \VQ have been misled by exceptional circumstan- 
ces, by the religious disagreement that has prevailed 
ever since the Reformation, to form a wrong notion of 
the very province of religion. That province is much 
more national and pohtical, much less personal, than is 
commonly supposed. Religion is not a man's private 
philosophy, whether that be based on reason or on reve- 
lation. It is the atmosphere of common thought and 
feeling which surrounds a community ; because all at 
once breathe it and live on it, therefore it is a religion. 
Upon the history of religion this peculiarity is written in 
characters so large that nothing but the violent drift of 
modern society in an opposite direction could have made 
us blind to it. But we are under a prepossession which 
causes us to overlook the leading part which nationali- 
ties have played in the great religious revolutions and to 
attribute everything to persons and individual opinions. 
We imagine religions to make their way either, like sci- 
entific doctrines, through their truth, or else through 
some adaptation to human needs, and do not perceive 
that commonly they are what may be called nationah- 
ties in an ideahzed form. 

Even in modern Europe we can obser\^e the affinity 
which exists between the spirit of nationality and that 
of religion. '^ Italy," said Mazzini, " is itself a religion.'* 
Yes ! the view of Hfe, the way of thinking which has 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 



187 



become characteristic of a nation, constitutes a sort 
of atmosphere round the individual members of it, an 
influence moulding the character of each successive 
generation which arises to represent it. Any shock or 
change which makes the individual aware of this atmos- 
phere about him, raises nationality into religion. '^ By 
the waters of Babylon " Jewish nationality is transformed 
into Judaism. Not otherwise at this day the American 
who finds himself in Europe translates of sheer necessity 
his American ways of thinking into a creed; he can 
think and talk of nothing else ; to every European he 
preaches, like St. Paul, " in season and out of season," 
America, America. And when the shock has been 
given by some tragic catastrophe, as in the case of 
ancient Jerusalem or modern Italy, the creed of nation- 
ality becomes solemn and intense, so that the suffering 
patriot says in all seriousness that his country is to him 
a rehgion. 

This phenomenon so often recurring may almost be 
called the key to rehgious history. We should find it 
in every page of the Bible did we not carefully interpret 
it away by giving an artificial meaning to all such words 
as Israel, Zion, Jerusalem. We should see, if we could 
forget the glosses, that we have before us the long epic 
of the formation, growth, sufferings, death and resur- 
rection of a nationality. The nationality rises again 
idealized and diffused in the form of a world-religion. 
How blind to see in the triumph of Christianity merely 
the prevalence of certain doctrines about the unseen 
world, merely the work of persons or the success of a 
philosophy, and not rather the idealization of the Jewish 
nationality ! It is the extension of the Jewish citizen- 



1 88 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

ship to the Gentiles. It is this so truly that the nations 
of Europe actually adopt as their own the entire history 
and literature of Israel, so that Jewish traditions, heroes, 
and poets supersede everywhere the native treasure of 
memory. What more could jMazzini desire for his Italy 
than that her Dante and Michael Angelo should be for 
the world what the Jews have seen their David and 
Isaiah become through Christianity^? 

Still more completely do we mistake the nature of an- 
other religious revolution only less great than this through 
our ignorance of the close connection between religion 
and nationality. The rise of Latin Christianity and of 
the Papacy is an event, the grandeur of which is utterly 
lost upon those who understand only private religion. 
They can see nothing in it but a corruption or perhaps 
a fraud. They do not see that the shipwreck of the 
Western Empire in the midst of the barbaric invasions 
was to the Roman world what the Babylonish captivity 
was to the Jewish, and that as the latter event created 
Judaism the former could not but call into existence 
Romanism. They do not see that the Holy Roman 
Empire of the Middle Ages is to Rome just what the 
Christian Church is to Judaism, that it is the resurrec- 
tion of a fallen nationality in an idealized shape. 

Look almost where you will in the wide field of his- 
"tory, you find religion, whenever it works freely and 
mightily, either giving birth to and sustaining states, or 
else raising them up to a second Hfe after their destruc- 
tion. It is a gi'eat state-builder in the hands of Moses 
and Ulfilas and Gregory and Nicholas ; in the ruder 
hands of Mohammed and many another tamer and 
guide of gross populations down to the Prophet of 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 89 

Utah it has the same character, the same too in the 
hands of the almost forgotten Numas and propagators 
of the Apollo-worship who laid the foundation of Roman 
and Greek civilization, and of the pilgrim fathers who 
founded New England. In the East to this day na- 
tionality and religion are almost convertible terms ; the 
Scotch national character first awoke in the adoption 
of a new religion and afterwards expressed itself more 
than once in national covenants ; the Reformation itself 
may be represented as coming out of the German na- 
tional consciousness, and it has been proposed to call 
the various forms of Protestantism by the collective 
name of Teutonic Christianity. Lastly in Christianity 
itself, in Romanism and partly also in Mohammedanism, 
we see religion in the form of an aggressive or mis- 
sionary nationality bringing foreign nations into a new 
citizenship. 

All this being overlooked, the very outlines of Euro- 
pean development disappear from our view. In losing 
sight of the connection between religion and nationality 
we lose the clue to the struggle of Church and State, 
which is the capital fact in the development of Europe. 
As in the first part of the struggle we overlook that the 
Church is but another aspect of the Empire, and Ca-\ 
tholicism but the embodiment of the Roman nationality, 
so in the later stages of it, in the modern struggle be- 
tween Catholicism and that which calls itself the State," we 
are blind to the fact that under the so-called State there 
lurks a new, yet undeveloped Church. For State and 
Church belong together and the link between them is 
nationality. As the Church without the State becomes 
a mere philosophical or quasi-philosophical sect, so the 



I go NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

State without the Church (/. e. without a living conscious 
nationality) is a mere administrative machine, the feeble- 
ness of which has been brought to light in the revolutions 
of the nineteenth century. On the other hand a State 
animated by a Church acquires a kind of nationality 
even when nationality in the strictest sense is wanting 
to it. Thus the Roman world was naturally but a con- 
geries of nations forced together by conquest, but religion 
made it one, till the phrases Orhis Roiiianus and Fopulus 
Christiamcs became convertible terms. And the modern 
states which boast so loudly of their absolute secularity 
or even of their hostility to religion are not content in 
practice to be merely secular, -as is showni by their eager- 
ness to get the control of education. They study to 
form out of their own separate nationality a new religion, 
to revive as far as they can the national religions which 
gave so vivid a life to the states of antiquity. 

If these views are just, if under the modern State there 
lurks an undeveloped Church and behind the Catholic 
Church there remain traces of the ancient imperial state, 
then the prevalent notion of the Church as dying and 
the secular State as destined soon to prevail against it is 
not less erroneous than we have found other popular no- 
tions about religion to be. The momentary evanescence 
of the Church in modern life is only caused by the 
decay of one sort of church coinciding in time with the 
infancy of another. In the ancient world the Church of 
single nationalities was vigorous, in the medieval world 
the Cathohc Church of the Roman world-state ; in the 
modern world we see the decline of the latter coinciding 
with the revival of the former. But if so, what is to be 
expected ? That we shall end where we began, that the 



r 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 191 



last traces of a universal Church will disappear and na- 
tional religions increase and compete against each other ? 
Surely not. The revival of the separate nationality will 
be checked after a certain point ; never again can the 
Nation eclipse Humanity ] and in the modern world the 
national spirit, though it refuses to be suppressed, is too 
narrow and provincial to play the first part. Already we 
see the necessary reaction against it setting in, and the 
complaint is heard that it has revived national antipathies 
and has filled the world with gigantic armies. 

We may look then for a counter revival of that cos- 
mopolitan system which was represented in the Middle 
Ages by the Empire- Church. The universal nationality 
restored to vigor will once more embrace the local na- 
tionalities, the provinces of humanity. Such a universal 
nationality, like all nationalities, will require both a State 
and a Church. What then will be the Catholic Church 
of the future ? 

The Church, according to the view here taken, is the 
atmosphere of thought, feeling, and belief that surrounds 
the State ; it is in fact its civilization made more or 
less tangible and visible. What then is the Universal 
Church but universal civilization? When a Universal 
Church stood out in visible shape before men, that 
is, in the Middle Ages, what was it but the embodiment 
of universal civiHzation as then understood ? A universal 
civilization exists now not less certainly. If it is less 
visibly embodied this is perhaps because it suffers loss 
pressure, because it is not now in constant danger of de- 
struction from Hun and Arab, Turk and Mongol. 

We can point to ah example of such an unembodied 
religion which never attained to be regarded as anything 



192 



NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



more than a form of civilization. Among the idealized 
nationalities enumerated just now one was omitted, in 
some respects the most influential of all. Did then 
the Greek nationahty never assume an ideal form? 
Assuredly it did. Hellenism is a phenomenon as con- 
spicuous as either Judaism or Romanism. But Judaism 
and Romanism are the names of religions, whereas 
Hellenism was never recognized as a religion but only as 
a form of civilization. Perhaps this was owing to the 
fact that its diffusion in the world was not accompanied 
by any tragedy or national agony exciting intense emo- 
tions. In any case it has been an influence not less 
powerful, enduring, and beneficial than that of most re- 
ligions, and it has been an influence of essentially the 
same kind. 

It is possible that modern civilization ought to be 
content with an influence not more palpably embodied 
than this. We cannot consider w^iat a mighty force 
religion has shown itself in creating and sustaining states 
without recollecting at the same time what terrible things 
it has done, and perhaps congratulating ourselves that 
rehgion in that ancient sense of the word seems now an 
exhausted volcano. A sane man cannot wish back again 
the Church of the Middle Ages, even though he may 
recognize all the grandeur and beneficence of it in its 
place and time. The important thing is not that we 
should have visible ecclesiastical institutions, but that 
we should feel ourselves to have our religion, although we 
call it only civilization, that the modern world too should 
be in its way a Jerusalem, an Athens, and no mere secu- 
lar Babel. 

Religion in the individual was identified above with 



ii 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 93 

culture ; religion in its public aspect now appears to be 
identical with civilization. And as culture was shown to 
be a threefold devotion to Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, 
it will appear that the term civilization expresses the 
same threefold religion, shown on a larger scale in the 
characters, institutions, and ways of life of nations. 

When Western civilization is confronted with the races 
outside it or the classes that have sunk below it, what 
does it feel irresistibly impelled to teach ? Science, that 
is definiteness of conception, accuracy of observation 
and computation, intellectual conscientiousness and pa- 
tience, and closely connected with these, the active spirit 
which rejects fatalism and beheves that man's condition 
can be bettered by his efforts. What^lse? Humanity, 
not limited by tribe or nation, and including all princi- 
ples affecting man's dealings with his kind, respect for 
women, respect for individual liberty, respect for mis- 
fortune. Again what else ? Delight and confidence in 
nature, opposed alike to the superstitious dread of 
idolatry and to the joylessness of monasticism or puri- 
tanism. 

This, then, is our civilization ; and what is the religion 
that inspires it ? That scientific spiril of observation and 
method is the worship of God, whose ways are not as 
our ways, but whose law is eternal, and in the knowledge 
of whom alone is solid well-being. That spirit of active 
humanity is Christianity, and it is supplemented by 
several other forms of the worship of Man which have 
grown up round it. Lasdy, that enjoyment of the visible 
world is a fragment saved from the wreck of Paganism. 
It is the worship of the forms of Nature derived from 
Greece, first widely diffused at the Renaissafice, and 

13 



194 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

welcomed since and spread still more widely by artist 
natures from age to age. 

We have remarked that a civilization or religion which 
to those who live in the midst of it is imperceptible as 
an atmosphere becomes distinctly visible in contrast 
with the outer world. Greeks felt their Hellenism in 
contact with barbarism and Jews their election in con- 
tact with the Gentiles. When the contrast becomes 
intense a condition of unstable equilibrium is created ; 
the religion becomes aggressive or missionary, and one 
of those great spiritual movements takes place which 
mark at long intervals the progress of humanity, such 
as the conversion of all nations to Judaism, to Roman- 
ism, to Hellenism. Now there never was a time when 
the equihbrium was so unstable as it is now between the 
great ruling civihzation of the world, which is no longer 
the narrow civihzation of some single city or tribe, but 
the great common tradition of a brotherhood of gi*eat 
nations, and the outlying peoples. Whereas in past 
times the better civihzation had to protect itself from 
destruction and became missionary in self-defence, now 
it is rather tempted to be apathetic from too triumphant 
superiority. It weighs the question whether barbarism 
should not rather be exterminated than converted, and 
while it does so the question answers itself, for the 
nations are baptized with gin and the chaff of humanity 
is burnt up with unquenchable fire-water. 

Thus the modern religion finds a vast work ready for 
its hands, a work which will compel it to give itself 
some organization. The children of modern civihza- 
tion are called to follow in the footsteps of Paul, of 
Gregory, of Boniface, of Xavier, Eliot, and Livingstone ; 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 



195 



but they must carry not merely Christianity in its nar- 
row clerical sense but their whole mass of spiritual 
treasures to those who want them. Let us carry the 
true view of the universe, the true astronomy, the true 
chemistry, and the true physiology to polytheists still 
lapped in mythological dreams ; let us carry progress 
and free-will to fatalist nations and to nations cramped by 
the fetters of primitive custom ; let us carry the doctrine 
of a rational liberty into the heart of Oriental despot- 
isms ; in doing all this — not indeed suddenly or fanati- 
cally, nor yet pharisaically, as if we ourselves had nothing 
to learn — we shall admit the outlying world into the 
great civilized community, into the modern City of God. 
A phenomenon so unique as the marriage of England 
and India ought, if anything can, to give life and dis- 
tinct shape to the religion of civilization among us. 
India wants so much that England has to give, even if 
we grant that there is much also which we might learn 
from India. But what precisely have we to give, and in 
what way precisely ought it to be given? For assuredly 
we have also much to give that India does not want, 
that would be ruinous to her. We are required there- 
fore rigorously to test our own civilization, to ask our- 
selves what influence goes forth from us, how far our 
spiritual contact is life-giving and how far it may be 
noxious and noisome. And in thus probing our civili- 
zation we cannot but be led to perceive that it is some- 
thing wholly different from our mere institutions, that it 
is a personal influence issuing at the same time out of 
each individual Englishman, and if we try to define it 
we shall be led at last to confess that it is neither more 
nor less than our religion. 



196 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

But along with it there goes forth from us also our 
irreligion, and still more, our false religion. And so 
India gets from England not only the rigorous and com- 
manding science of the West, not only its Christian 
humanity enlarged by Teutonic liberty, not only its less 
dreamy enjoyment of hfe, but also all English heresies, 
all our deviations from the line of true civiKzation, all 
our Ignorances, rudenesses, and shortcomings. The na- 
tional faults, which we so readily pardon in ourselves, 
which we smile at and are half proud of, may well 
frighten us when we see them magnified in the total 
working of the whole nation upon another nation, and 
still more in the general impression produced by Eng- 
land upon mankind. Our want of any high ideal, the 
commonness of our aims and of our lives, the decay of 
that strong individuahty which used to be our boast, our 
want of any moral greatness which may at all correspond 
to the wide extension and prosperity of the English 
race, all this which we fondly misname our common- 
sense, our honest plainness and practicality, may well 
frighten us when we view it thus, and may almost fill us 
with the foreboding of an ignominious national fall. 

These and such as these are the thoughts which 
belong to religion, these far more than speculations 
about cosmogony or miracles or a future life. Witness 
the Hebrew prophets themselves, including the last and 
greatest of them all ! Their great topic was always the 
destiny of cities and nations, the rise and fall of king- 
doms, national sins and punishments, and whether ^^ in 
the judgment it should be more tolerable " for this city 
or for that. 

But if modem civilization ought to become missionary 




RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 97 

it ought to embody itself in something of the nature of 
a church. And thus we arrive at the Church of the 
Natural Religion. 

A church without supernaturalism ! The idea is so 
little familiar to us that it may be well to state distinctly 
at this point the difference between the conception here 
presented of a church and that which is current. 

For the current notion which is somewhat as follows : 
That an absolutely unique supernatural occurrence, 
namely the Resurrection of Jesus, called into existence 
an absolutely unique institution called the Church ; that 
the progress of scepticism in modern times having 
thrown doubt on the reality of this occurrence the 
Church is likely to fall, and that after the fall of the 
Church human society will be left purely secular : 
we are led to substitute a view which may be thus 
stated : 

That every community has in a form more or less 
organized that for which Christianity furnished a name, 
that is a church, or rather that every such community is 
in one aspect a church as in another it is a state ; that 
Christianity was the instrument by which the universal 
state, the Roman Empire, completed itself and became 
also a church; that the growth of new states in the 
bosom of the ancient Empire has created a powerful 
reaction against the universal religion, because each 
new state is ambitious of having a religion and a church 
to itself; that the decline of the ancient Church paves 
the way not to secularity but to a new growth of national 
religions such as those of the ancient world ; but that 
the ancient Church has left behind it a conception of 
universal civilization, which holds in check these national 



198 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

religions and out of which a new universal church and 
religion is likely to grow ; so that it seems likely that, 
as the ancient world had national religions and the 
medieval world a universal religion, the future will 
witness national religions flourishing inside a grand 
universal religion. 

It is not solely in order to deal with the outlying pop- 
ulations that the universal religion might well embody 
itself in a church. There is a domestic problem no less 
urgent. It is not only for foreign exportation that civ- 
ilization needs to be concentrated into a doctrine ; with- 
out such concentration it can scarcely maintain itself at 
home. This is no new-fangled notion, but one of the 
oldest and best authorized observations. All old philos- 
ophers knew that the fabric of the State rested ultimately 
upon a way of thinking, a habit of opinion, a " disci- 
pline," which was a thing so delicate and easily deranged 
that in the opinion of some of them new tunes coming 
into vogue might be enough to cause a revolution. If this 
was true then, in a world comparatively quiet, in commu- 
nities subject to few shocks of thought, how much more 
true must it be in the vast organization of later times ? 
That impalpable way of thinking needed afterwards, in 
the age of migrations, to harden itself into an iron doc- 
trine guarded by a potent priesthood ; thus only could 
the great miracle of human history be accomplished, 
civilization and the unity of it be preserved. Another 
universal danger now threatens. The tide of barbarism 
might be stemmed by spiritual authority; the tide of 
thought, scepticism, and discovery which has set in since 
can be stemmed by no such means. No wise man in- 
deed wishes to stem it ; and yet in some way it must be 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 1 99 

warded off the institutions which it attacks as recklessly 
as if its own existence did not depend on them. It intro- 
duces everywhere a sceptical condition of mind, which 
it recommends as the only way to real knowledge ; and 
yet if such scepticism became practical, if large commu- 
nities came to regard every question in politics and law 
as absolutely open, their institutions would dissolve, and 
science, among other things, would be buried in the ruin. 

Modern thought brings into vogue a speculative 
Nihilism which explodes traditional theories, such, for 
instance, as the theory of Monarchy ; but unintention- 
ally it creates at the same time a practical Nihilism 
which explodes and annihilates the Monarch himself ! 

There is a mine under modern society which, if we 
consider it, has been the necessary result of the abey- 
ance in recent times of the idea of the Church. There 
is a total want of correspondence between the views of 
the people and the system under which they live. The 
body wants a soul, the State wants a Church. This is 
equally true of the populations which are still conserva- 
tive as it is of those which are revolutionary. The link 
has been broken which united the mass to the advanced 
minds. The people have long ceased to understand or 
to follow their own development. 

In England the ideas of the multitude are perilously 
divergent from those of the thinking class. No sufficient 
pains have been taken to diffuse everywhere the real 
religion of the age. Accordingly a large section of the 
people adhere to the limited religion of the past as it 
was in the last age of the real efficiency of ecclesiastical 
organizations, and another large section have abandoned 
this and have gained no other religion in its place. No 



200 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

adequate doctrine of civilization is taught among us. 
Science only penetrates either in the form of useful in- 
formation or else in that of a negative doctrine opposed 
to religion ; as itself a main part of religion, as the grand 
revelation of God in these later times supplementing 
rather than superseding older revelations, it remains 
almost as much unknown as in the dark ages. Still 
less known perhaps is that doctrine of the gradual 
development of human society which alone can explain 
to us the present state of affairs, give us the clue to 
history, save us from political aberrations and point 
out the direction of progress. So long as churches 
were efficient this idea of the continuity of civiliza- 
tion was kept before the general mind. A grand out- 
line of God's deahngs with the human race, drawn from 
the Bible and the church doctrine, a sort of map of 
history, was possessed by all alike. Are we sufficiently 
aware what bewilderment must arise when this is no 
longer the case, when those old outlines grow unservice- 
able, but no new map is furnished ? 

Such bewilderment may continue for a long time pas- 
sive. In a country like England, a country of publicity 
and reform, where poHtical institutions do not press 
overwhelmingly upon the individual, where for instance 
there is no conscription, the absence of any doctrine of 
civilization may but make pubhc opinion perplexed and 
vacillating, so as to cause the nation to seem unworthy of 
its position in the world. But this same bewilderment, 
which here produces only dulness, leads on the Conti- 
nent to revolutionary frenzy. There the old instruc- 
tress of nations, the Church, has not merely dechned in 
influence but is regarded as a mahgnant deceiver ; there 



RELIGION AND THE STATE. 201 

too the pressure of governments is severely felt. The 
result is a body without a soul, institutions without cor- 
responding ways of thought, or in other words a State 
without a Church. The suffering individual instead 'of 
seeing in the institutions around him his institutions, the 
house he lives in, sees no connection between himself 
and them, knows not how they came or why they exist, 
and suspects them to be but the walls of a prison into 
which he has been entrapped by a conspiracy of priests 
and kings. One doctrine of civilization he has rejected 
as false, and he conceives no other except the wild 
improvised conjecture that it has been from the begin- 
ning a wicked imposture. 

The truth is that religion is and always has been the 
basis of societies and of states. It is no mere philoso- 
• phy, but a practical view of life which whole communi- 
ties Hve by. For this purpose it must have a basis more 
solid than mere individual opinion. What can this basis 
be? " Divine revelation and miracle," said men in past 
times. They said so because then miracles had an 
overwhelming, awe-striking effect beyond ordinary evi- 
dence. But a change of opinion has taken place, so 
that miracles instead of compelling belief have now the 
effect of provoking disbehef. Is then religion hence- 
forth impossible ? 

But in proportion as miracles have declined, scientific 
method has risen, in credit. Why should it not then 
be capable by this time of doing what in old times only 
miracle could do ? " Ah ! but unhappily science re- 
fuses its testimony on the very points which are most 
essential. We want a future life, a heaven which will 
atone for all our sufferings here, and science will not 
give us one." 



202 



NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



True, this purpose of religion science will not serve. 
But it is by no means the only purpose of religion. 
From history we learn that the great function of religion 
has been the founding and sustaining of states. And at 
this moment we are threatened with a general dissolu- 
tion of states from the decay of religion. Now it does 
not seem impossible without miracle and using scientific 
method alone as our organ of discovery to lay down 
such a Natural Religion as may serve at least this pur- 
pose, and may be a sustaining principle to the civiliza- 
tion of the world. 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



203 



-CHAPTER V. • 

NATURAL RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 

We have been led on from the conception of a Natural 
Religion to that of a Natural Church. We have not 
thought of it as a mere Utopia, which may or may not 
sooner or later be reaUzed. This Church exists already, 
a vast communion of all who are inspired by the culture 
and civilization of the age. But it is unconscious, and 
perhaps if it could attain to consciousness it might 
organize itself more deliberately and effectively. 

Now there exists by the side of this a Church which 
has had from ancient times consciousness and organiza- 
tion. It is still vigorous and influential, especially in 
this country. Ought the vast unconscious Church here 
described to disregard the conscious Church, and ought 
it to organize itself independently ? Or should it regard 
the existing Church organization as rightfully its own, 
and as capable by reform of being adapted to its pur- 
poses ? For thus when fifty years ago a new England 
had sprung up in vast manufacturing towns of which 
Parliament knew nothing, that new England did not 
frame for itself a new ParKament, but called for a Reform 
Bill which admitted it into the old. 

The hindrance to such a course is obvious enough, 
and yet it must seem strange to those who arrive at the 



204 



NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 



notion of a church as we have done. The great ideas 
which He at the basis of civilization do indeed demand 
much study from those who are to teach them, but we 
are not disturbed by the fear that of able and serious 
men undertaking such study, a large proportion will end 
by rejecting the ideas as untrue. Or if such a doubt 
should arise we should think it ought to be met by 
reconsidering,- and, if necessary, altering the accepted 
doctrine. We should certainly not think it ought to be 
met by rigidly excluding all such heterodox candidates, 
however numerous, however able, however serious. The 
clergy of such a church as has been here described, if it 
should have a clergy, would be subjected to no tests of 
opinion, but only to tests of character and competence. 
It would be held that liberty of opinion was the first con- 
dition of their efficiency as teachers. 

Now this, which is stated here as self-evident, is almost 
universally considered monstrous and almost a contradic- 
tion in terms. Freethinking is understood to be the 
opposite qf religion, and accordingly membership in a 
church is supposed to imply a restriction upon the 
liberty of thought. The very idea of freethinking as an 
important condition of religion and especially of efficient 
religious teaching, provokes ridicule ; it has been de- 
scribed as " a medley of St. Paul and St. Voltaire." But 
if we have succeeded in drawing the distinction between 
religion and philosophy, it will now be clear that a 
church is wholly unlike a philosophical school, held 
together by doctrines. If, as we have held, it is more 
like a state than a school, doctrinal tests will begin to 
seem more absurd than the absence of them. Imagine 
a state resting upon dogma ! 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 205 

Suppose we had formulated in the sixteenth century 
the principles or beliefs which we supposed to lie at the 
basis of our national constitution. Suppose we had 
made a political creed. Perhaps the doctrine of divine 
right and the power of kings to cure disease, perhaps the 
whole legend of Brute and the derivation of our state 
from Troy would have appeared in this creed. Once 
formulated, it would have come to be regarded as the 
dogmatic basis upon which our society rested. Then in 
time criticism would have begun its work. Philosophy 
would have set aside divine right, science would have 
exploded the belief about the king's evil, historical criti- 
cism would have shaken the traditionary history, and 
each innovation would have been regarded as a blow 
dealt at the constitution of the country. At last it would 
have come to be generally thought that the constitution 
was undermined, that it had been found unable to bear 
the light of modern science. Men would begin publicly 
to renounce it ; officials would win great applause by 
resigning their posts from conscientious doubts about the 
personahty of King Arthur ; and those who continued 
orthodox would declare that they felt more respect for 
such persons, much as they deplored their heresies, than 
they could feel for other officials who continued to 
receive the emoluments of the State when it was sus- 
pected that they had altogether ceased to believe in tlie 
cure of the king's evil, and when they explained away 
with the most shameless laxity the divine right of tlie 
sovereign. If any of this latter school, whom we may 
call the Broad State, should argue that the State was a 
practical institution, not a sect of people united by hold- 
ing the same opinions, that it existed to save the country 



206 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

from invasion and houses from burglary, they would be 
regarded as impudent sophists. "Was not the creed 
there? Were not all officials required to subscribe it? 
How then could it be affirmed that the State did not 
stand upon community of opinion, upon dogma? '* And 
if any of these sophists were evidently not impudent, but 
well-meaning and high-minded, they would be regarded 
as wanting in masculine firmness and the courage to face 
disagreeable truths- It would be generally agreed that 
the honest and manly course was to press the controversy 
firmly to a conclusion, to resist all attempts to confuse 
the issue, and to keep the pubHc steadily to the funda- 
mental points. Has the sovereign, or has he not, a 
divine right ? Can he, or can he not, cure disease by his 
touch? Was the country, or was it not, colonized by 
fugitives from Troy? And if at last the pubhc should 
come by general consent to decide these questions in 
the negative, then it would be felt that no weak senti- 
ment ought to be Hstened to, no idle gratitude to the 
constitution for having, perhaps, in past times saved the 
country from Spanish or French invasion ; that all such 
considerations ought sternly to be put aside as irrelevant ; 
that as honest men we were bound to consider, not 
whether our constitution was useful or interesting, or the 
like, but whether it was true, and if we could not any 
longer say with our hands on our hearts that it was so, 
then, in the name of eternal truth, to renounce it and 
bid it farewell ! 

Now why should churches, if they are not mere philo- 
sophical schools, be bound by dogma more than states ? 
Institutions are not mere machines ; they are also 
organisms ; they have a certain power of gradual self- 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



207 



modification analogous to growth. And they have this 
power usually in proportion to their healthy vigor. Thus 
it is that the English State has weathered the storms of 
a thousand years. If now it is a thing profoundly dif- 
ferent from the England over which Edward the Con- 
fessor ruled, the change has been made in the same 
insensible manner by which the child with its tender 
limbs, vague, dreamy thoughts and fickle instinctive 
motions, passes into the man with his strong-set frame, 
fixed habits, and sure logical trains of reflection. And 
that it has been capable of such a gradual transformation 
is the best evidence of the healthy vitality which has 
animated it. There could have been no more certain 
proof that it was but half alive or that the English nation, 
like some other nations, wanted the political sense neces- 
sary for forming a state worthy of the name, than an 
inability to pass through such modifications silently, or 
a disposition, whenever such changes became necessary, 
to dissolve the State on the ground that it no longer 
answered its original definition, perhaps with some vague 
intention of afterwards forming a new one. 

Such a rigid definition are the formularies and articles 
by which churches bind themselves. A church cannot 
any more than a state submit to such trammels without 
confessing that it is not really alive, and that it is a 
machine rather than a living organism. 

Nor has a church any strong hold on life if it only 
deems itself in a healthy condition while it continues to 
be what it was originally, or if it thinks to cure its ail- 
ments by undoing all the modifications which time has 
brought and restoring its original shape. This ])roccss 
is called in the Church reformation and is thought of as 



208 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

an evidence of vigor ; and of this kind are almost all 
movements which go on within the Church, that is, they 
are returns upon the past, revivals of what was dead, re- 
institution of what was obsolete. 

Such anxious retrospectiveness would not be thought 
a healthy symptom in other institutions. Life looks on- 
ward, not backward ; the man does not pride himself 
upon being precisely like the boy, but there does come 
a time when he regrets to perceive himself altered, and 
we know what this means ; it means that he has begun 
to decay. 

An institution is healthy in proportion to its indepen- 
dence of its own past, to the confident freedom with 
which it alters itself to meet new conditions. 

In this volume an attempt has been made to treat the 
subject of religion in a practical manner. We have asked 
the question. Is there really such a thing as religion in 
the sense in which our fathers took the word, that is, not 
some faint feeling in feminine minds, not some hardly 
discernible subtlety of a special school of philosophers, 
but a thing obvious, palpable, huge, filling the earth and 
the sky and dwarfing everything else by its magnitude? 
Of course this can only be, and yet people not know 
it, if some egregious mistake of nomenclature has been 
made, so that what past generations used to call religion 
has now got another name or names and the word re- 
ligion has been transferred to something of less impor- 
tance. This then has been asserted. It has been shown 
that the multitude, fixing their eyes, as is their wont, only 
upon the outsides of things, have identified religion with 
its organization, with churches and chapels, with the cleri- 
cal profession and its interests. They have accordingly 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 209 

mistaken the fact that this organization has ceased to be 
efficient for a decline in religion itself. But it has seemed 
to us that though religion runs shallow or scarcely runs 
at all in its old channel, this is only because the stream 
has been drawn off in other directions. We have found 
the substance of religion still existing, but outside its old 
organization, broken up and distributed under other 
names or under no name. Man has still grand spiritual 
interests, which are all-important to him and which he 
partly feels to be so ; only to his misfortune he has ceased 
to think of them together in the whole which they consti- 
tute. If he could view them thus they would affect him 
with the same solemn anxiety which we trace in ancient 
utterances concerning religion. He would see that re- 
ligion is everything, if not precisely in the sense of those 
who talk of an endless heaven or hell awaiting each in- 
dividual, yet in the sense of the ancient prophets who 
watched over the weal of their Jerusalem. He would 
see that on religion depends the whole fabric of civiHza- 
tion, all the future of mankind. 

Now the clear recognition of this in churches would 
make it possible for them to live again with a healthy life. 
All that retrospectiveness, that unhealthy inclination for 
revival and what is called reformation, proceeds from a 
conscious perplexity about the object for which churches 
exist. Those who cannot see the end fix their eyes, as 
the next best thing, upon the beginning, as in politics also 
fantastic revivals are sometimes undertaken by immature 
or dilettante politicians. All such aberrations spring from 
want of seriousness, and seriousness consists in knowing 
what you desire, in consciously willing the end and will- 
ing the means. If in churches there were found the se- 

14 



2IO NATURAL RELIGION^ APPLIED. 

riousness that is found in states, if the spiritual interests 
were as vividly clear to the churchman as those partly 
material, partly spirituaV interests which occupy the poli- 
tician are clear to him, we should see the same free and 
inventive adaptation of means to ends in ecclesiastical as 
in secular politics. ^ 

An attempt has here been made to consider the 
Church with reference rather to its end than to its be- 
ginning. It has been shown that religion does not always 
need any very palpable embodiment, but that in very 
large communities there is danger lest for want of a doc- 
trine of civilization, and therefore an organized Church, 
multitudes should grow up without any acquaintance or 
sympathy with the order in which they live. Now of all 
such great social organisms the largest ever seen on earth 
is that to which we ourselves belong, the great whole of 
which the Christian Church once formed the soul and 
the European system, an Empire slowly dissolving into a 
brotherhood of States, was the body. Being so large and 
having institutions so complicated, it does need much 
spiritual machinery. And yet in the last century or so 
this machinery has been wanting, owing chiefly to the 
self-assertion of the smaller national organisms which 
conceal partial national religions. The result has been 
what might have been expected, a result of which few yet 
measure the awful importance. It is something which 
almost threatens the death of the organism, that is, of 
European civilization itself. It is a vast rebelHon of the 
less prosperous classes against the whole system which 
has nursed them, a fierce repudiation on their part of the 
whole system or law, way of viewing the universe or wor- 
ship, which lies at the basis of the civilized world. It 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 211 

includes a mortal hatred against all visible authority, a 
complete political revolution. 

This movement is not to be confounded with the 
movement of reform. The reformers are those who 
desire to advance civilization, which they regard as a 
gradual development. They are therefore adverse to 
everything like immobility, and even believe that change 
ought now to advance with some degree of rapidity. 
Naturally therefore their attack upon survivals and abuses 
is often vehement and bitter. But it is echoed in quite 
another tone by a vast host who are so far from holding 
this doctrine of development that they are quite unable 
to conceive it. These are not reformers or progressists. 
Their conceptions are of the archaic primitive kind. 
They hold that happiness is a fixed thing within easy 
reach of all, and that civiHzation is the mass of frauds by 
which it is appropriated to the few. Their object there- 
fore is not to advance civilization, but to destroy it by 
assassination and massacre. 

If we really beheve that a case can be made out for 
civilization, this case must be presented by popular 
teachers, and their most indispensable qualification will 
be independence. They perhaps will be able to show 
that happiness or even universal comfort is not, and 
never has been, within quite so easy reach, that it cannot 
be taken by storm, and that as for the institutions left us 
from the past they are no more diabolical than they are 
divine, being the fruit of necessary development far more 
than of free-will or calculation. Such teachers would be 
the free clergy of modern civilization. It would be their 
business to investigate and to teach the true relation of 
man to the universe and to society, the true Ideal he 



212 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

should worship, the true vocation of particular nations, 
the course which the history of mankind has taken 
hitherto, in order that upon a full view of what is possible 
and desirable men may live and organize themselves for 
the future. In short the modern Church is to do what 
Hebrew prophecy did in its fashion for the Jews, and 
what bishops and Popes did according to their lights 
for the Roman world when it labored in the tempest, 
and for barbaric tribes first submitting themselves to be 
taught. 

Another grand object of the modern Church would be 
to teach and organize the outlying world, which for the 
first time in history now lies prostrate at the feet of 
Christian civilization. 

Here are the ends to be gained. These once recog- 
nized, the means are to be determined by their fitness 
alone. The question is not what means the Church 
'employed in other times, for other times had other 
problems, not what was done by Paul or Gregory or 
Luther, but what men who, like Paul, Gregory, and Luther 
knew what they were about, would be likely to do now. 

But if so why should we delay while we puzzle our- 
selves with the question, " Are we really members of the 
Church or not? Can we conscientiously call ourselves 
Christian? Is the Christian religion true? Is it not 
necessary, before we can act, to invent a new religion? " 
The tricth of a religion is a phrase without meaning. 
You may speak of the truth of a philosophy, of a theory, 
of a proposition, but not of a religion which is a con- 
dition of the feelings. Nor ought we to speak about 
joining or leaving a church as if a church were a philo- 
sophic school or a poHtical party. A church is the social 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 213 

organism into which a man is born ; his membership 
in it, like his membership in a state, is not a matter of 
opinion or belief, nor is it to be put on or off at pleasure. 
And as to the Christian Church it is simply the spiritual 
side of the great organism of civilized society throughout 
the Western world. 

The most cross-grained sceptic, the spirit most in love 
with negation, can scarcely deny the grandeur of the 
original conception of a universal Church. As we can 
still trace to some extent the gradual growth of it in the 
mind of its Founder, it is the largest and highest of all 
conceptions. That there is something under the State 
which is not quite the State, a thing as yet unnamed, — 
shall we call it kingdom of God ? shall we call it ecclesia ? 
— and then that, as God is one and Man is one, this 
something must underlie not each nation only but all 
mankind taken together — the vision of the whole race 
passing out of its state of clannish division, as the chil- 
dren of Israel themselves had done in the time of Moses, 
and becoming fit to receive a universal constitution, this 
is great. Great too is the temporary realization of the 
vision, when the world-church, thus largely sketched, 
met with a world-state strangely fit to be its complement, 
and so for the first and only time in history Universal 
Civilization took visible shape. The thought of human 
Society as resting on a double basis, of civilized men as 
the children of a transcendent marriage between the 
spiritual and the temporal, suggested the image of the 
Mother Church, the Wife of the crowned Humanity. 
At other times a spiritual city was spoken of, which de- 
scended from heaven and was set up in the midst of the 
cities and kingdoms of the earth. 



214 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

This conception of a spiritual city is precisely what is 
now needed. But can we recognize the faintest attempt 
to realize it in the actual organized Church ? Does this 
institution even pretend to perform such a function, to 
act as the organ of civiHzation, as the interpreter of 
human society? Does it explain to us the development 
by which we have been brought to our present stage ? 
Does it open to us the vista of the future ? Does it make 
us at home in human history, and so save us from the 
bewilderment and horror which the past excites when 
we open its records at random, by showing us how rigor- 
ously human progress has always been conditioned, how 
much is impossible, and at the same time how much 
and what the laws of history justify us in hoping for? 
Such guidance was never more needed than now, when 
this horror is seizing innumerable minds and exciting 
them to frenzy. But does the Church even pretend to 
offer it? 

We know that for the most part it is occupied with 
quite other topics. To most of its utterances the active 
world Hstens in half- contemptuous silence, feeling that 
it is useless to controvert the propositions laid do\\m, and 
that no results would follow from admitting them. The 
propositions are archaic ; they show that the Church 
once understood its function and discharged it efficiently. 
Something evidently has arrested development. \\Tiat? 
The retrospectiveness, the anxious fear of ceasing to be 
what it originally was, which seizes an institution when it 
has begun to be uncertain why it exists. 

But why should the outside public approve such de- 
votion to archaic dogmas, as if it were the only honest 
and rational course which the Church could take ? 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



215 



Circumstances have created a sort of fixed idea in the 
public mind, an inveterate association between the belief 
in certain dogmas and the membership of a certain 
church. Accordingly a view like that which has been 
here presented is certain to be met in general with ob- 
jections like the following. 

"Possibly such a way of regarding religion and the 
Church may be in itself sound. But in that case the 
proper inference is that we want a new^ religion, that 
we ought to dissolve the present Church and to found 
another. And perhaps it may be true that ' the good 
Lord Jesus has had his day,* that other hopes and 
other beliefs animate the modern world, which when 
the time is ripe will find their proper embodiment. In 
that case it is a mark of weakness and vagueness of view 
to attempt to slur over radical difficulties and to confuse 
together under a cloudy statement inconsistent ideas. 
Let us say, if you will, reHgion will endure, but let us 
say with firmness, Christianity will die. There may be 
a church in the future, but it will not be the Christian 
Church.'* 

The assumption involved in this, viz., that the Chris- 
tian Church is a society founded upon a dogma is neither 
altogether absurd nor quite without plausibility. Such 
societies there are. Those who have some common 
conviction and wish to propagate it, adherents of some 
doctrine or disciples of some master, commonly have 
some association among themselves, though they seldom 
go the length of excluding from it all who cannot sub- 
scribe a symbol. And if we look, as Protestants are 
disposed to do, at the original institution of Christianity, 
we find it growing out of the single alleged fact of the 



2l6 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

Resurrection, we find St. Paul himself declaring that 
without that fact it was nothing — the fact being pre- 
cisely one of those which the modern scientific school 
puts on one side. On the other hand the Catholic view 
is still more pitilessly dogmatic. Here no doubt is ex- 
planation enough of the opinion now commonly held 
about Christianity and of the tenacity of it. 

But a great organic growth such as Christianity, filling 
so vast an extent both in space and time, is not to be 
judged by the estimate of any single observ^er were it St. 
Paul himself. The strongest creations of human socia- 
bility are not those which have sprung up in the most 
logical and consciously reasonable way, but rather those 
which have their roots buried deep in the unconscious 
part of human nature. Could we penetrate to the origin 
of Athens, we should not find that conscious artists and 
conscious philosophers assembled to lay the first stone of 
it. We should find a simple village-community and one 
or two temples with a sacred legend preser\^ed in each ; 
scarcely a presentiment of what was to spring from such 
a germ ; only a vague belief to the efiect himc frondoso 
vertice collem, quis deus incertum est, habitat deics. And 
yet we do not say that the later developments of Athens 
were illegitimate, abusive ; when we read of Solon's 
impatience at the first modest beginnings of Athenian 
tragedy we judge him mistaken ; we judge that while 
he thought himself a wise reformer calling the citizens 
back to first principles he was in reality short-sighted, 
and that his example proves that the instinct of develop- 
ment in a truly living institution is wiser than the wisest 
individual man. 

It is not very bold to claim for the Christian Church 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



217 



that it has as much right to develop and expand as any- 
political institution that hopes to live must needs have. 
If at first it sprang out of a local miracle and may have 
been little distinguished from other waves of feeling that 
were propagated by the religious guilds of the ancient 
world, Christianity is not now identical with belief in the 
Resurrection of Jesus. It is now and has for fifteen 
centuries been something wholly different, namely the 
great bond holding the European races and their off- 
shoots together in that sort of union out of which natu- 
rally springs a common polity. True it may be that the 
miracle was the essential fact without which the union 
would never have been accomplished ; there may have 
been a time when it was true that ^' if Christ be not risen 
our faith is vain ; " but when the union has taken place, 
has endured for a thousand years and though since 
weakened and endangered yet subsists in the form of an 
indestructible common civiHzation and sense of unity 
among nations, it is true no longer. The Christian 
Church is now the visible expression of a true cosmo- 
politanism which will be eternal, and this being so, it 
avails nothing henceforth against it to argue that after all 
Christ is not risen. Nay, no conceivable historic scep- 
ticism ought to have the power to shake it, any more 
than the fabric of imperial Rome at its height would 
have been shaken if a Beaufort or a Niebuhr had arisen 
at the court of Augustus to question the personality of 
Romulus. 

Rome was strong because it looked to its end, the 
Christian Church is now weak because it looks back to 
its beginning. And here is the difference between the 
great social fabrics which last for thousands of years and 



2l8 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

the temporary associations, such as philosophic or politi- 
cal parties, which live only the wearing out of a fashion 
of thought. So long as an institution has a visible and 
palpable use, so long as we want and feel that we cannot 
do without the support of it, so long its continuance 
cannot be made a question and it has a robust Hfe that 
no criticism can touch. Thus to most of us the English 
State seems to exist as necessarily as the sun and moon, 
and an Enghshman does not ask himself anxiously what 
discoveries historical research is making about our early 
kings, or w^hether he agrees with Hengist and Horsa. 

The Christian Church was once an institution of this 
kind, of all institutions on the earth incomparably the 
greatest and firmest ; it was not so much like the sun in 
the heaven as it was a hght of which the sun was a pale 
reflection. In those ages of slow intellectual movement 
when all Hellenism, all philosophy or science, was in 
abeyance for several centuries, it was possible to hold 
this commanding position for a long time without sub- 
mitting to much internal modification ; but since man 
began again to think, to know, and to discover it has 
become more evident with every century that churches 
like states can only live on the condition of changing 
freely and perpetually. The time has evidently come 
at last when this must absolutely be admitted, unless the 
Church would be a martyr to its own dogmas and would 
lay down a principle which Jesus Christ denied, the 
principle namely of finality in Divine Revelation. 

But it may be urged that if this time has come it has 
come too late for Christianity. ''The decline of the 
Church has advanced so far that there can be no more 
question of reforming it, even if such a Reformation was 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



219 



Still possible two 01 three centuries ago. A certain 
amount of corruption might be purged away, languor or 
debility might be removed by opening new sources of 
life, but the season of such remedial measures is past. 
When reformers everywhere find the Church the great 
obstacle in their path, when it seems the great asylum 
for all abuses, where they find shelter and an air of 
sacredness is thrown over them, the time is come for a 
revolutionary outbreak. Ilfaiit en fiiiir. Like Savona- 
rola or Luther or Knox, nay like Jesus Christ himself, we 
must declare war against a hypocritical organization." 

It is not quite extravagant to take this tone against 
Catholicism. A system which has been associated in 
the past with so much crime and has so firmly resisted 
reform provokes this style of opposition, and all the 
more so because in its abasement it has retained so 
much grandeur. But neither Jesus Christ, nor Luther 
and Knox, when they proclaimed the downfall of a cor- 
rupt hierarchy, thought of establishing society, by way of 
reform, upon a secular basis. All alike treated the sys- 
tem they attacked as the perversion of something good 
and sacred, all alike substituted another church for that 
which they destroyed. Our modern reformers who wish 
to hand over what they take from the Church to the 
State are of a different type. They are of those who 
do not understand that there must always be a church, 
organized or not, where there is a human society. These 
are like children, who confound air, the most necessary 
of realities, with vacuum or nothing at all. 

But there are some among them who say that no doubt 
a new religion and church must be introduced in the 
room of Christianity, that it must be a system founded 



220 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

upon science and embodying "the real honest beliefs of 
the present age. That such a system ought to be intro- 
duced has been assumed throughout this book ; but is 
it so evident as not to be worth discussion that because 
such a system might in many important points be incon- 
sistent with the Christianity of the creeds therefore it 
must be introduced as a rival system, and that a place 
must be cleared for it by the destruction of Christianity? 
Must there needs, so to speak, be two Acts of Parliament, 
the first abrogating Ciiristianity and the second institut- 
ing the new system in its place ? Is this the way in which 
great changes are usually or wisely made in the world? 
Is it not rather evident that the most extreme opponent 
of the Christian creed, unless he is a Secularist, ought to 
design the reform and not the destruction of the Chris- 
tian Church? 

It may be true that on the Continent reformers are 
provoked by the immobility of the Church to take a 
revolutionary course, in spite of all the untold evils, 
the incurable ulcer of social discord, that may spring 
from such a policy. But when we contemplate the re- 
ligious question from the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon point 
of view we can see no reason to do so. The Church here 
looks more hke an organism and less like a vast machine. 
We can imagine without much difficulty EngHsh and 
American Christianity taking a shape adapted to the 
age. We should have little difficulty in conceiving that 
fixed exclusive dogmas are no more necessary in the 
Church than in a state or a university or in a philan- 
thropic society ; only we are for the time puzzled to 
give a precise answer to the question. If the Church is 
not a society holding certain dogmas, what is it ? 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 221 

To this question then we answer as follows. The 
Church is neither more nor less than the spiritual city 
of Western civilization ; but this city has been dilapi- 
dated by schisms and revolutions so that it is scarcely 
traceable in the present and is best understood by look- 
ing back to the world-church of the Middle Ages and to 
the small state-churches of Israel and of Greece. As 
to dogmas, we say that the word is unsatisfactory, but 
that the Church so understood does indeed hold certain 
dogmas in the sense of cherishing certain views of the 
universe, certain maxims of life, certain habits and tastes ; 
that however it does not pride itself either upon the pe- 
culiarity or upon the unchangeableness of these dogmas ; 
that many of them are simple and indisputable enough, 
mere truisms if considered philosophically, and only made 
important by being acted upon ; that others again it shares 
with many other religions ; that others have been called 
in question by modern science, with respect to which it 
only asks that science be not too hasty and do not in- 
dulge malice against a rival system, while it professes to 
be actuated by nothing but a love of truth ; and that 
others again, the growth of later centuries, have never 
been formulated into dogmas at all nor recognized by 
the ecclesiastical authorities, and yet are of priceless 
value ; finally that a reform is evidently needed by which 
new truth, such as welLs forth so abundantly in the mod- 
ern world, shall be taken up into the teaching of the 
Church. 

As to the controversy between orthodoxy and science 
this volume is not concerned with it. True religion, as 
it is here defined, can never have any conflict with science 
except when science disregards the claims of humanity. 



222 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

Only as we have a duty to truth we consider also the in- 
terests of the human republic. We reflect that a reckless 
devotion to the pursuit of truth may endanger the foun- 
dations of society partly by shaking too suddenly the 
behefs upon which it is founded, partly by creating a dan- 
gerous chasm between the philosophic class and the vul- 
gar. We hold therefore that while the dispute between 
orthodoxy and science continues undecided there should 
take place a great coalition of all who are serious on both 
sides. While Science says, '' Before we can seriously 
benefit mankind we must exterminate Christianity/* it 
breaks the continuity of history, sets men at wild war 
with their own past, alienates all those who by training 
and disposition feel most tenderly towards mankind, and 
surrounds itself exclusively with those whose studies are 
cold and in some cases foster a ruthless fanaticism. While 
Christianity devotes itself to a crusade against modern 
thought, it is likely either to be beaten, if it fights the 
philosophers with their own weapons, or to rouse the 
superstitions of the vulgar, if it appeals to feeling against 
thought. It remains then to make the most of the com- 
mon ground between them ; this common ground is Nat- 
ural Religion and the Christian Church so far as the Chris- 
tian Church shows itself to be modifiable. 

That Natural Religion is a far larger and more sub- 
stantial thing than is commonly supposed, that it is in- 
deed as wide as modern civilization, has been argued at 
length. On the other hand, why should not the Chris- 
tian Church open itself to the modifications which the 
age requires ? Any one who should study the nature of 
Christianity only in the Bible would praise it most of all 
for this that more than any other religion it takes account 



RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 



223 



of the claims of time. In the long religious development 
recorded there nothing is so impressive as the historic 
piety which binds the successive revelations together. 
The prophets reverence the lawgiver; Christ and his 
apostles reverence both; and yet each new revelation 
asserts its own superiority to those which went before, 
the superiority not of one thing to another thing but 
of the developed thing to the undeveloped. It is thus that 
the ages should behave to one another. Has Christianity 
lost this secret, this understanding and concert with time ? 
It possessed it assuredly in its first period. The apostolic 
writings like the prophetic are full of the future ; they do 
not look upon all development as ended, but study in- 
tently to divine what time will bring next, what new dis- 
pensation, what second coming is in store for the Church. 
But in passing into other races Christianity could not but 
suffer by being dissociated from the tradition of Jewish 
prophecy. It could not but lose the prophetic spirit, 
the eager study of the future. 

We have spoken of science as replacing miracle ; 
prophecy it does not so much replace as restore. As it 
grasps human affairs with more confidence it begins to 
unravel the past and with the past the future. It shows 
the significance of each new social or political phase 
as the Hebrew prophets studied to do. History and 
prophecy belong together. As it was prophecy that 
made the old Church modifiable by preparing it to 
understand each new time, the modern Church may 
recover the power of development by calKng liistory to 
its aid. That view of history as a whole which past 
generations had, when they spoke of the creation of the 
human race six thousand years ago, of Adam's flill, <S:c., 



224 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 

may seem to us crude, but some such general view we 
must have if mankind is to be saved from bewilderment 
and anarchy, an anarchy which is already almost upon 
us. Such a view grows every year fuller and more dis- 
tinct through the labors of scientific historians, a view 
of the past from which the future in some of its large 
outlines may be inferred. And thus as science replaces 
the cosmogonies of old religion, history scientifically 
treated restores the ancient gift of prophecy, and with 
it may restore that ancient skill by which a new doctrine 
was furnished to each new period and the old doctrine 
could be superannuated without disrespect. 

Lastly it is a capital circumstance that the organiza- 
tion is there, an organization for working on all man- 
kind at once, which once destroyed could not without 
vast trouble be replaced. To send a new life through 
this organization, the life of science and history, would 
be a shorter and a cheaper course than to destroy it. 
But this course would call for a great moral effort. 
Ecclesiastics would need courage, and the opposite 
school forbearance. Both alike would need, and this 
perhaps in practice would be the hardest requirement, 
to rise above the petty love of petty triumphs, the de- 
generate propensity to idle quarrelling ; they would need 
in short the seriousness which comes from the sense 
that great issues are at stake, scarcely less indeed than 
the whole future of civilization. 



1 



RECAPITULATION. 



225 



RECAPITULATION. 

It remains to collect together and exhibit in one view 
the principles to which we have been led separately and 
successively in the course of this volume. 

There is a Lower Life, of which the animating prin- 
ciple is secularity, or — in the popular sense of the word 
— materiaHsm. This Lower Life is made up of purely 
personal cares, and pursues even in the midst of civili- 
zation no other object than those which the savage pur- 
sues under simpler conditions, self-preservation, personal 
possession and enjoyment, personal pleasure. The prin- 
ciple of secularity would lead in fact to savage isolation 
but for the influences which check and thwart it in civil- 
ized society, compelling it to wear a disguise and re- 
ducing it to a dangerous tendency. The Good Cause 
of the world consists in resistance to this tendency and 
detection of its disguises, wherever it is found working 
not openly in nihihstic outbreaks but insidiously by 
weakening or perverting the great institutions of co- 
operative hfe. 

There is a Higher Life, of which the animating prin- 
ciple has been called at different times by different 
names, but the most comprehensive name for it is re- 
ligion. It is the influence which draws men's thoughts 
away from their personal interests, making them in- 
tensely aware of other existences, to which it binds 

IS 



226 NATURAL RELIGION. 

them by strong ties sometimes of admiration, sometimes 
of awe, sometimes of duty, sometimes of love. Under 
this influence the individual ceases to be a mere indi- 
vidual and becomes the member of some corporate 
body, whether city or nation or tribe or church, and 
his acts in consequence begin to have a moral char- 
acter, as being determined by some motive larger than 
personal interest. When the influence has operated for 
a long time upon a wiiole community, each member of 
it finds himself amply overpaid for his sacrifices by a 
richer consciousness, a capacity for more various and 
finer enjoyment ; the savage becomes a citizen ; and in 
the midst of the community there grows up a great 
treasure of institutions, arts, inventions, traditions, re- 
finements and habits, which is called collectively its 
civilization. 

But this process sufl*ers interruption and frustration 
in many ways, principally in tw^o. In the first place the 
influence which draws together and conglobes certain 
individuals into a living society acts as intensely in pro- 
ducing discord outside the society as in creating union 
within it. The corporate bodies, each of w^hich is a 
nucleus of civilization, are all at war with each other. 
The sacrificing Aryan, the *^ twice -born man," regards 
all that are outside his sacred community as '^ devils," 
against whom he must wage perpetual war ; the Israel- 
ite, made suddenly into a hero by his divine law, rushes 
down upon Hittite and Jebusite asserting a divine right 
to their territory ; the Islamite overthrows kingdom after 
kingdom for no other reason than that his prophet has 
given him a new principle of life. And by such wars 
religion often destroys itself. For conquest mixes again 



Mi 



RECAPITULATION. 22/ 

the atoms of humanity ; it neutralizes the religions that 
held them together, and so disperses them again through 
doubt and bewilderment. The Romans had not long 
begun to conquer before they perceived that conquest 
would destroy the heroism that had made it possible by 
introducing foreign disciplines. Their foreboding was 
fulfilled j the Empire of Rome was undermined by moral 
decay until a new discipline grew up which embraced 
the whole of it. 

This experience of the discords produced by all par- 
tial religions, with the example given in the Roman 
Empire of the way in which such discords may be 
healed, has put before the minds of men an unfading 
vision of a universal religion which may unite all man- 
kind at once as the partial religions have united particu- 
lar communities. 

But religions do not only hurt each other by collision, 
they also decay inwardly. Springing up ordinarily in 
the infancy of the human mind they are alloyed from 
the beginning with mistake and misconception. They 
are indeed alloyed with something far worse, of which 
in this volume intentionally nothing has been said, but 
which it may be well once for all to take note of. 

Let it be remarked then that religion has been treated 
of here only so far as it is a good thing. In comparing 
religions in order to discover their common property it 
has always been tacitly assumed that there is a species 
of religion which is noble, and that our concern was 
with this alone. But assuredly there is also a species 
of religion which is bad intrinsically and yet is of such 
common occurrence that it might almost lay claim to 
determine the sense which should be given to the word 



228 NATURAL RELIGION. 

religion. Religion has been regarded here as the link 
of feeling which attaches man habitually to something 
outside himself, and it has been assumed that this feel- 
ing is always of the nature of admiration and love. But 
as a matter of fact it is quite as often of the nature of 
terror. If we chose to describe religion as a night-mare 
eternally troubling man's repose, depressing all his pow- 
ers with slavish dread and tempting him to terrible 
crimes under the name of expiations, history no doubt 
would amply bear us out. But on the whole in the 
modern world the better aspect of religion has vindi- 
cated itself. The word is now more naturally used in 
a good sense. It is no longer convertible with super- 
stition. We recognize that men have at times a vision 
of something mighty and horror- striking which makes 
them grovel in the dust, and that this is superstition, but 
that they have also at other times a vision of something 
as glorious as it is mighty, and that this is reHgion. 

Nevertheless, though we can thus distinguish in thought 
religion from superstition, we cannot always prevent them 
from being intricately mixed together in fact. It has 
rarely been found possible to extract from religion the 
nobler element, so as to escape suffering at the same 
time from its wasting influence. Not only in Tauris or 
in Mexico but here in England religion has been and is 
a night-mare, and those who flatter themselves that they 
have shaken off the horror find a colder, more petrifying 
incubus, that of Annihilation, settling down upon them 
in its place, so that one of them cries out, Oh I rej>re?ids 
ce Rien, goiiffj^e^ et i-ends-noiis Satan. 

But even the nobler kind of religion, as it springs up 
naturally, is full of mistake and misconception. It fxnds 



i! 



RECAPITULATION. 229 

the man at a certain stage of enlightenment, it lightens 
up with love and wonder his view of the universe, but it 
does not of itself correct that view. And as religion is 
one of man's earliest friends, it finds him commonly 
when his view of the world is not merely a little wrong 
but childish and fantastic in the extreme. Out of con- 
ceptions half- childish half-poetic it constructs objects of 
worship, and in the temples built to these and in the 
sacred poetry and history which grow out of the worship 
of these, all the poetic childishness is consecrated and 
perpetuated. In this way religion, at first the inspiring 
guide of man, becomes at a later time his tyrant. She 
who taught him his rudiments opposes his higher educa- 
tion, and with all the more effect that she does it '^ with 
no unworthy aim and e'e7i with something of a mother's 
mindr 

Almost always when religion comes before us histori- 
cally it is seen consecrating in this manner conceptions 
obsolete or obsolescent. The stage in which it fully 
satisfies the best intellects lasts commonly but a moment. 
Then begins a time in which it wants a little help from 
interpretation. What was meant literally must now be 
taken figuratively ; what was advanced as fact must be 
received as allegory. Yet still for a long time the very 
greatest minds range themselves sincerely on the side of 
belief. Sceptics may perhaps have witnessed the first 
representations of Aeschylus, and assuredly there was 
scepticism in the age of Dante, but Aeschylus and Dante 
were greater than the sceptics. How long this period 
of substantial effective predominance will last depends 
very much upon the character of the reigning religion. 
It could not last very long in Greece, where the re- 



230 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



ligion was too evidently primitive and childish though 
so lovely. Italian religion fell speedily into contempt. 
But Christian orthodoxy, to the composition of which 
so many and various elements had gone, which was de- 
veloped in the midst of advanced politics and advanced 
philosophy, which had a broad strong basis in Jewish 
history and prophecy and a superstructure composed of 
materials drawn from Plato and Aristotle — this was 
able to hold its own with ease for many centuries. 
When the spirit of inquiry was reawakened in the twelfth 
century, the Church was able to make it subservient and 
to create a philosophy of her own. As Dante was 
orthodox in the fourteenth century, Michael Angelo was 
orthodox in the sixteenth. If Rabelais and Montaigne 
knew themselves not to be Christians, if probably Shaks- 
peare's mind in its immense wanderings had become 
acquainted with doubt, yet still throughout the seven- 
teenth century great and subtle intellects, such as Pascal 
and Milton, could feel their spiritual life to be rooted in 
the Christian tradition. 

A third stage begins in the history of religions when 
the best minds begin consciously to admit that their 
view of the universe has altered since the religion was 
first promulgated. Then, and not till then, arises a 
great practical question, What is to be done ? 

A question difficult enough in itself; but we compli- 
cate it unnecessarily. It is an effect of the greatness 
and sovereign nature of religion that the particular 
variety of it under which we live seems to us the only 
possible religion. When therefore this is attacked we 
do not say, A religion is in danger ! but, Religion is in 
danger ! And the new views of the universe are never 



RECAPITULATION. 



231 



thought of as a new religion or as a modification of 
religion, but as something secular in their nature. At 
best they are called philosophy or science. 

And yet what are these philosophies, but the freshest 
attempts to grasp the universe ? Now are not the re- 
ligions which they attack but older attempts to do the 
same ? The only peculiarity of religion is that it is a 
philosophy which has in some past time shaped a com- 
munity, and therefore by a kind of necessity, lest the 
community should fall to pieces again, holds a sort of 
monopoly in it. If we make the extreme supposition, 
namely that the reigning religion is wholly opposed to 
the new views and must be rejected wholly, it would 
still not be immediately certain that religion as such 
must suffer or secularity gain, for the new philosophy 
might prove a more edifying and ennobling religion 
than that which it replaced. 

Another unnecessary difficulty which we introduce is 
to regard the new system as much more flatly opposed 
to the old one than it really is. Here again religion 
suffers from the fact that it has its roots in the primitive 
period of society. For hence it gathers precedents of a 
rude barbarous mode of conducting controversy. In 
minds accustomed to philosophic thought a change of 
opinion does not come by abrupt cataclysm but by 
gradual development. If it be accompanied by debate, 
the debate is conducted with candor and temper. But 
religion by its nature is the ancient philosophy of a 
whole community, that is, it is a philosophy of unphilo- 
sophicai people. It is discussed therefore, like politics, 
with wild party spirit and with an eager desire to make 
all differences as sharp as possible. Like politics, it is 



232 NATUKIL RELIGION. 

seized as a pretext for fighting, since fighting in one 
form or another is the salt of life to the majority in most 
communities. But religious controversy is always some 
degrees more barbarous than pohtical, as it appeals to 
more primitive precedents. It imbibes the spirit of an 
age when war was the business of life, when rude war- 
riors turned dogmas into war-cries. And even to the 
present day, though we have gro^vn so familiar with the 
nicety of philosophic distinctions and the deHcate hand- 
ling they require, yet when the subject is theology we 
grow indignant at anything that looks like compromise, 
think the edge of controversy cannot be too sharp, and 
insensibly take crusaders and iconoclasts for our models. 
Yet assuredly the great religious problem of modern 
times is to purge this taint of barbarism away from 
religion. An attempt has been made here to assert for 
religion all the sovereign importance that has ever been 
claimed for it. But all such attempts will be vam and 
religion will perish in spite of them, if we must needs 
attribute this sovereign importance to abstract verbal 
propositions or dogmas. In stationary periods, when 
but one or t^vo ideas at a time ruffled the mind of 
nations, such verbal religions might be strong, but not 
in an age like this, when new ideas come upon us in a 
torrent that is never intermitted. 

"We must face once for all the truth that these great 
views of the universe upon which states and forms of 
civilization rest are partial and provisional, however 
much they may assert themselves to be final. But we 
must realize on the other hand that states really do rest 
upon them and not upon nothing at all, so that the 
decay of a great rehgion involves a revolution of incal- 



RECAPITULATION. 



233 



culable magnitude. We are driven then not by some 
sentimental weakness, but by the feeling that society has 
claims upon us as well as truth, to the conclusion that 
in this province New and Old must not be allowed '^ to 
meet and clash like armed foes/' but that all reasonable 
means should be tried to graft the new upon the old. 
This may indeed prove to be impossible. The true view 
of the Universe must be opened to the population of 
India, even though it should seem to blot out and cancel 
all the conceptions in which they have lived for three 
thousand years. Such is the awful Nemesis of a system 
which arrests change too long and too successfully ! 
But even there, and much more elsewhere, let what is 
possible in the way of accommodation be done. 

This general view of the nature of religion and of the 
two great perversions to which it is liable has been ap- 
plied in this volume to the religious question of the day. 
We see a great religion approaching the end of its second 
millennium. It held together for many centuries the 
civilization of Europe ; it does so to this day more than 
most suspect. But it suffers from both the perversions. 

First it cannot persuade itself but that all other reli- 
gions must be its enemies. For a long time it struggled 
to show that Mohammed must be an impostor, as though 
the loss of Islam could not but be its own gain. It 
could not without great effort imagine but that the hea- 
then must be excluded from God's mercy. It was hurt 
when any strong resemblances to its own creed or scrip- 
tures were produced from other sacred books, and has 
therefore looked on in sheer dismay at the discoveries of 
recent times, which have shown so much resemblance 
among most great religions. The curious correspond- 



234 NATURAL RELIGION. 

ence, for example, between Buddhism and Christianity 
affects our religious world with distress, though before- 
hand one might perhaps have expected it to cause 
delight and triumph. But such is the nature of religion, 
which being an attractive force to those whom it brings 
together is a force of violent repulsion towards those 
who are without. 

Secondly, it has allowed itself like other great rehgions 
to be stereotyped. And it has now entered upon that 
phase when minds of the higher order are seldom found 
to receive its ancient dogmas with complete conviction, 
when they do not altogether belong to it even when 
they most admire it and most appreciate the service it 
has rendered to mankind. It has reached this rather 
advanced stage of decline, and has left quite behind it 
the first stage when individual disbelievers were indeed 
numerous enough, but still minds disposed to religion, 
even when they were minds of the highest order, were 
troubled with no scepticism that they could not over- 
come. 

This volume has not aimed at combating the scepti- 
cism of the age. It has rather assumed that a system of 
doctrine which has been left unrevised for more than a 
thousand years must needs provoke scepticism. The 
only questions here raised have been : How fai does 
the prevalent incredulity extend? and, What course 
ought to be adopted if its case were completely made 
good? We have protested against that fatal propensity 
to exaggerate differences, that taste for discord even 
when discord is most ruinous, that craving for excite- 
ment which would rather make life a tragedy than see 
it deprived of all dramatic interest. We have argued 



RECAPITULATION. 



235 



that not theology as such nor religion as such, but both 
only as far as they are founded upon supernaturalism, 
are attacked by modern philosophy ; that undoubtedly 
an age of progressive discovery cannot regard a system 
two thousand years old with the undiscriminating rever- 
ence of the Middle Age, which looked up in all things to 
antiquity as superior to itself; that it will regard the 
Bible and the creeds as archaic in form ; but that on the 
other hand it may easily regard them as true in sub- 
stance or as presenting grand outlines of truth, since 
indeed the modern way of thinking is especially his- 
torical and appreciates the past all the more as it does 
justice to the future. We have pointed out analogies 
between the stern rigor and hatred of anthropomor- 
phism shown by modern science and the very same 
qualities in Hebrew prophecy, between the tone of He- 
brew religion and that nature -worship which breathes in 
modern poetry, between the humanity of the modem 
world and the spirit of early Christianity ; we have re- 
marked in short that both the Old Testament and the 
New lose that appearance of obsoleteness which ecclesi- 
astical formalism has given them, and stand out as true 
sacred books and classics of mankind, so soon as in 
the former Nature is written for God and in the latter 
Humanity for Christ. 

So much has been urged in respect to the doctrinal 
system itself which was established so many centuries 
ago. Considered solely in itself it seems to be the 
archaic outline of precisely such a religion as would sat- 
isfy the modern world. But secondly wc have urged 
that it would be much more than this had it not been 
stereotyped so early, and that the finality which has so 



236 NATURAL RELIGION. 

long prevailed in religion is peculiarly abusive in the 
Christian Church and prevents Christianity from doing 
justice to itself. Other religions have been stereotyped 
early because their first preachers were narrow-minded 
and could not conceive of development in religion. 
But our rehgion was not at first of this kind, since the 
most remarkable feature of our Bible is its system of 
successive revelations covering many centuries, and its 
doctrine of an Eternal God who from age to age makes 
new announcements of His will. Here again in archaic 
form we have a modern doctrine, by the help of which 
Christianity ought to have been preserved from the 
fate of other religions which have found themselves 
incapable of bearing a change of times. It follows that 
we may find in Christianity itself the principle that may 
revive Christianity, for the principle of historical develop- 
ment, which is what we need, is plainly there, and the 
whole Bible is built upon it. Christianity was intended 
to develop itself, but something arrested it. The spirit 
of prophecy, that is, of development, did not continue 
sufficiently vigorous in the Church. It was not indeed 
absent. The prophet of the Apocah^se and Paul show 
us in what way Christianity might have faced the new 
exigencies. In later times too it exhibited itself occa- 
sionally. Augustine's ^' City of God " may be called a true 
prophecy. The creation of the Papacy is a wonderful 
proof of life and the power of self-adaptation in the 
Church. At the Reformation and since true prophets 
of the ancient t\^e have appeared. And in more recent 
times outside the Church there has been a disposition to 
treat the great wTiter of each period as having a prophetic 
mission, as though we felt that, the old Hebrew sense 




RECAPITULATION. 



237 



of historical development having revived, the Hebrew 
prophet must revive with it. But if this spirit had been 
lively in the Church at all times, if at all periods proph- 
ets had been on the watch to discern " the face of the 
sky and the signs of this time," and the Church had 
retained the power of receiving a prophet and rendering 
him due homage, that dangerous gulf which now we 
witness between the teaching of the Church and the needs 
of the people need never have opened. 

But after all the evil cannot be thought irremediable 
since the disease is of an ordinary kind and has many 
times been cured. This doctrine of development has 
always been seized with difficulty and soon dropped 
again ; the prophet, who beheves in past and future 
alike, has always been opposed by those who believe 
only in the past or only in the future, that is by the 
majority. It has been urged here that at least in Eng- 
land and America a reform is still possible, since in both 
countries the old religion retains its hold not merely 
upon sentimentalists but upon a vast number of calm and 
serious minds. 

Such a reform must rest upon the principle that as 
Christianity was wider than Judaism so the religion of 
the present age must be wider than Christianity, but at 
the same time as Christianity did not renounce Judaism 
so our religion must not renounce Christianity. If the 
Eternal revealed Himself between Moses and Christ, 
surely He has not ceased to reveal Himself since the 
time of Christ. If we say so we cannot be serious, for we 
know that in recent times we have learnt far more of the 
laws by which the universe is governed than former ages 
knew. Accordingly in this volume an attempt has been 



238 NATURAL RELIGION. 

made to distinguish the additional element which modern 
ages have brought but which our stereotyped system has 
refused to admit or assimilate. 

We have noted at what points the human mind seems 
cramped by the reigning orthodoxy, and so cramped 
that it cannot permanently submit or acknowledge the 
wholesomeness of the restraint. We found on the one 
side artists bitterly complaining of its yoke, of the prim- 
ness and suspiciousness of its morahty j on the opposite 
side we found science rebelling against the sentimental 
and unreal view of the universe w^hich it imposed as 
dogma and to maintain which it fettered the freedom 
of inquiry. Both these opposite rebellions appeared to 
gain strength irresistibly from age to age, and both ap- 
peared not irreligious but religious in the spirit that ani- 
mated them. We could not but acknowledge that the 
inspiration of the artist though less serious, and that of 
science though so terribly austere, had the character of 
religion, that they were binding forces such as destroy 
selfishness and sustain the Higher Life. Nay in the 
latter we seemed to see the very same iconoclastic 
impulse that lay at the root of Semitic religion, while in 
the other we found the delicate spirit of Greek Paganism, 
which had been crushed in the blind rancor of victori- 
ous Christianity and had left the world deploring its loss 
ever since. 

Especially of late years and among ourselves Art and 
Science have proclaimed themselves to be not mere 
rebels against the reigning religion but rival religions. 
The change in their tone is very marked. The artist, 
literary or other, who in Walter Scott's time professed 
only to furnish amusement to the public and to be richly 



RECAPITULATION. 



239 



contented if they applauded him, now assumes the air of 
a priest and makes it a point of honor to speak of his 
pursuit as a cult. The scientist does this with still more 
decision ; he is now a priest of Truth as the other of 
Beauty, and he asks with the loftiest self-consciousness 
what any Christian priest can have to say to him. 

According to this volume the Christian priest can only 
be silent ; it is the penalty he suffers for having allowed 
himself to believe that the Eternal, who used in old time 
to teach man by successive revelations, has long since 
ceased to do so. But may he not now recover the lost 
ground by reviving the Hebrew doctrine of development ? 

It has been alleged here that he may recover a great 
part of it. For of the new knowledge, the new views of the 
universe, of man, and of the history of man, which have 
opened upon us and which make us feel more than ever 
the need of spiritual guidance, — though unfortunately 
they seem to escape the notice of our authorized 
spiritual guides ; of this new knowledge by far the larger 
part is only additional to our estabhshed Christianity and 
by no means opposed to it. The monkish asceticism 
and horror of nature against which Art protests, the dread 
of free inquiry which seems so contemptible to Science 
— these are not to be found in the original Christianity, 
they are but vices which mark the failure of Christianity 
to adapt itself to new and trying conditions. There is no 
reason why Christianity should not now recognize views 
of Hfe which are really kindred to its own, though they 
were beyond the Hebrew culture of its first preachers. 

But of course in practice there arises a difficulty which 
cannot long be overlooked and which it has been an 
object of this volume to deal with. The conception of 



240 'SXTi'RAL RZUGION. 

successive revelations of Himself made by the Eternal, 
discerned iirst by prophets, and made by them manifest 
to all, makes indeed a grand basis for a progressive 
religion ; but how much margin does it allow for mistake ? 
In the Bible itself this conception is handled broadly, 
and in the st}-le of a nation capable of great ideas, but 
quite incapable of criticism. There is a remarkably 
firm grasp of the idea of development in the ages, and 
of a certain economy in revelation by which it is adapted 
to the ^'hardness of heart " of a particular generatioiu 
But there is no admission that mistake on a great 
scale may mix with revelation, that beside the true and 
the false prophet there may be the mistaken prophet, 
speaking at one time great truths and at another time 
falling into great erroi^. Accordingly we find here no 
precedent which shall tell us what to do when our 
religion needs not merely to be developed fiirther, but 
to be corrected, when it appears not merely unripe but 
simply mistaken and wrong. 

Now such a precedent is just what we need and 
scarcely know how to do without. For the difficulty 
which the modem world feels in dealing with its ancient 
religion is not so much that it has been too much stere- 
ot}-ped — that is a difficult}* which might conceivably be 
surmounted — but that it is mistaken in the most impor- 
tant points. \Ve are told that it needs correcting not 
developing, and that even this is not the whole truth. 
Its fundamental statement, uj)on which avowedly its 
whole system is built, is itself, it is now maintained, 
untrue. For what is, what was originally the Gospel, but 
the announcement that Jesus was risen fi-om the dead ? 
Now it is the prevalent opinion among those who are 



RECAPITULATION. 24 1 

most penetrated with the modern spirit that Jesus did 
not rise from the dead. What then can the modern 
world do but conclude, however regretfully, in the words 
of St. Paul himself, that its faith, the faith of eighteen 
centuries, is vain? 

It is this dilemma which at the present time frustrates 
the efforts of those who would hold themselves at liberty 
to reject miracle and yet avoid the fathomless abyss 
which would be left by the disappearance of the ancient 
religion of Christendom. For they are obliged either to 
pronounce Christianity a vain faith or to think that St. 
Paul, speaking in his most prophetic tone with unusual 
emphasis and with an air of the most deliberate solem- 
nity, was mistaken. 

But as we suppose development in everything, so we 
ought to expect development in the idea of prophecy. 
The Hebrews conceived the vision of each prophet to 
be limited,- so that he would be left behind by the 
prophet of the next age. The conception was grand 
and true, but it would be absurd that we, with an infi- 
nitely larger grasp of history and with habits of more 
exact thought, should bind ourselves too strictly to it. 
We recognize that there are seers gifted to trace the 
course of human destiny, who help us to understand 
what new scene in the drama of time is about to open. 
But we do not now believe that such seers are merely 
limited in their views, we think them capable of error 
and of great error. We even think that their intensity 
is closely connected with a certain waywardness, and 
that the very vividness with which they see some thhigs 
makes them blind to others ; so that we are never sur- 
prised to find them as often more right, so at times 
-" 16 



242 NATURAL RELIGION. 

more wrong, than the rest of the world. And whatever 
we may think either of miracle in general or of the par- 
ticular miracle of the resurrection, it is difficult now, 
whether we look at the first rise of Christianity or at its 
later history, to admit that it hangs by a thread, as St. 
Paul declares, logically attached to the testimony of Ce- 
phas and the Twelve and the Five Hundred. Its basis 
is rather the whole Judaic conception of the foundation 
of the state and of the development of history. The 
grand pages of Hebrew prophecy, including those con- 
tained in the Gospels, would not be cancelled if all that 
testimony were discredited ; nay it is one of the most 
clearly marked circumstances in the biography of Jesus 
that the thought of death and resurrection did not rise in 
his mind till his undertaking had reached an advanced 
stage. Again it is certain that the other great feature 
in the history of Christianity, the union it established 
among European nations and the universal civilization 
it thus brought to light, is quite separable in thought 
from the miracle of the resurrection, however much 
belief in the miracle may have contributed to bring it 
about. And this subsequent addition made to Chris- 
tianity would go far to compensate any loss it might 
suffer by the loss of its miraculous element. 

In a word Natural Christianity regards prophecy too 
as natural and therefore highly fallible. It can imagine 
even St. Paul mistaken. Nevertheless it believes in 
prophecy, and so far from thinking that no ^' sure word " 
is vouchsafed to men it beheves that there not only 
once were, but that there still are, prophets, or rather 
vehicles of pure truth concerning man's relation to the 
universe and the course of his history far more trust- 



RECAPITULATION. 



243 



worthy than the Hebrew prophets. It lowers somewhat 
the value of the ancient Revelation, but it adds a revela- 
tion made since and still making. 

We conclude then that it is a mistake to imagine 
Christianity as standing or falling with the miracle of the 
Resurrection, and that it rests in fact not on the narrow 
basis of a disputable occurrence but on the broad foun- 
dation of Hebrew religion, Hebrew prophecy, and the 
historic union of the nations in the Christian Empire. 
When this is once granted, it will appear that the U7tmi- 
raculous part of the Christian tradition has a value which 
was long hidden from view by the blaze of supernatu- 
ralism. So much will this unmiraculous part gain by 
being brought for the first time into full light, such new 
and grand conceptions will arise out of it, illuminating 
the whole history of mankind, that faith may be dis- 
posed to think even that she is well rid of miracle and 
that she would be indifferent to it even if she could 
still believe it. For the religion that thus emerges is in 
many respects more powerful and animating, mainly 
because it is more public, than supernatural religion can 
be. Supernatural religion, all must feel, has not done 
so much, has not reformed the world so much, as might 
have been expected. Its failure is evidently due in 
great part to its supernaturalism, to the unnatural stress 
it lays upon a future life. To hope even with enthu- 
siastic conviction for a future life is one thing ; to be 
always brooding over it so as to despise the present life 
in comparison with it is another. The orthodox system 
is always in practice sliding into this error, because its 
vision of the future life is far too distinct and mythologi- 
cal. By the side of such a vision everything historical. 



244 NATURAL RELIGION. 

all the destiny of states and nations, fades away, and 
men become quietists if not monks. A religion arises 
which is intensely personal if not selfish, which does 
not, like the reHgion of the Bible, accompany history, 
interpret every historical change, and in fact make time, 
change, and development its subject-matter, but contem- 
plates fixed objects and ^' forgets itself to marble " in 
contemplating them. 

But as we perceive with great clearness that the 
original Judaic religion though it had supernaturahsm 
had it not in this form, and instead of being monkish, 
otherworldly, and immutable was social, political, and 
historical, we find ourselves reconciled with the past and 
the future at the same time by pushing the supernatural- 
ism of our rehgion into the background. By reviving 
prophecy in its modern form of a philosophy of history 
we at once adapt religion to the present age and restore 
it to its original character. 

One great object is always before us while we study 
the Judaic religion in the Bible, Jerusalem or Zion, or the 
kingdom of God, or the New Jerusalem, or the " city 
which hath foundations.'' In the Bible this city, sacred 
as it is, is exhibited as subject to the vicissitudes of 
time ; now it is happy and triumphant, now it sits in the 
dust or is carried into captivity. The supernatural guar- 
dianship does not save it from adversity or raise it beyond 
the reach of sympathy. But in our modern religion this 
Zion has been transferred across the grave into a starry 
region of eternal immobility. It is gone away to heaven, 
which is as much as to say that it is dead. Supernatural- 
ism has killed it. 

Now according to the view here presented the spiritual 



RECAPITULATION. 245 

city is here on earth as much as it was in the times of the 
Bible. For it is neither more nor less than civilization 
itself, which consists not in any visible fabric nor even 
essentially in institutions, but in religion or worship or 
the higher hfe. As in the Bible the spiritual city is iden- 
tified in language with a definite locaHty, a visible citadel 
and temple, and yet is always held separable from such 
local limitations, so in our view the civilization of the 
later world was for a long time gathered into an institu- 
tion, the great World-Church or World-State of Europe, 
but yet does not absolutely require such embodiment; 
the machinery may grow old and unserviceable ; it may 
be cast aside, and a time may elapse during which it re- 
mains unreplaced. For the spirit, the religion, the wor- 
ship, is not to be identified with any visible forms, so 
that we are not to be too much astonished if when the 
New Jerusalem of modern civilization appears before us 
we " see no temple therein." 

This view may fairly claim to be nearer to the original 
Christian scheme than that which has taken its place. 
But does it not also supply the link among religious 
thoughts which is often thought to fail when supernatu- 
ralism becomes doubtful? Without supernaturalism, we 
are told, religion is mere moraHty or mere philosophy ; 
very proper perhaps but mere morality, very true per- 
haps but mere philosophy ! Not so, for it is inseparably 
intertwined with politics and history. At the bottom of 
every state we shall find a religion, a religion underlies 
universal civiHzation, and necessarily therefore religion is 
the main subject of history. 

This view will also be found most useful to the culture 
of the age. For in our culture there is at present a most 



246 - NATURAL RELIGION. 

• 

dangerous gap. While most other great subjects of 
knowledge have been brought under systematic treatment, 
rescued from mere popular misconception, and then, 
when the great generalizations have been duly settled, 
rendered back to the people in authoritative teaching, 
one subject remains an exception, and that one the all- 
important subject of the history of civilization. No grand 
trustworthy outlines have yet been put within the reach 
of all, which may serve as a chart to guide us in pohtical 
and social movement. 

Such a chart, it has been pointed out, Hebrew proph- 
ecy in archaic manner gave. But the work was long 
ago broken off, and the result is that history has become 
for all popular purposes a chaos. Who derives guidance 
from it? Who does not lose himself in its labyrinth? 
On that sea we embark without a compass and without 
any fixed point by which to steer ; we are driven hither 
and thither upon it by gusts of national prejudice, or 
theories taken up at random. An abstraction called the 
State is set up as a sort of absolute end ; its glory or well- 
being made the standard of public action. Its relation 
to other States or to the whole, the ground of its pre- 
tensions, how it arose, why it exists, and whether it will 
exist for ever, in fact all the largest and most urgent 
questions are decided at random, if they are decided at 
all. On the most important of all subjects there is put 
before us a medley of facts unclassified and unverified 
such as excites the ridicule of the man of science ; and 
yet we receive them with delighted interest ; we are 
rational on other subjects, but madmen on the greatest 
subject of all. 

This subject, it has been urged, is in the proper sense 



% 



RECAPITULATION. 24/ 

theology, and it is the grand topic of the Bible. Con- 
sidering man as in the presence of a great Necessity, 
theology inquires how his ideals may be conformed to 
it. The Bible is a great history of the dealings of a cer- 
tain human group with this Necessity, of their attempts 
to obey it, of their fits of disobedience and forgetfulness. 
This is the proper historical point of view, which must be 
taken up in modern history also if it is to become a 
source of serious instruction, to have its canonical books, 
or to cease to be the Babel of national brawls and men- 
dacious party recriminations that it is. The remedy lies 
in regarding history with more reverence, as a main part 
of religion ; only thus can we save it from the unprin- 
cipled perversion it now suifers at the hands of party- 
writers ; the remedy lies too in seeing, as the Hebrews 
did, not only the struggles of men in history but the de- 
crees of a superior Necessity, for history is a source of 
wild delusions, of the mania of admiration in reactiona- 
ries, and of the frenzy of hatred in revolutionists, to those 
who see in it only human free-will. 



But what of Supernaturalism ? Throughout this volume 
it has been held aloof, and our principal object has been 
to break the inveterate association which in the general 
opinion connects religion with it. We have denied that 
Supernaturalism is necessary either to the idea, or to the 
practical vigor, or to the popular diffusion, of religion. 
We have even maintained that when it is made the main- 
spring of religion it does harm, since it gives religion an 
unpractical, unprogressive character, and withdraws it 



248 NATURAL RELIGION. 

from the main current of modern thought. And yet it 
has been so long and so uniformly treated by all religious 
parties as such a mainspring that when it is removed from 
this position, religion is altered and becomes difficult to 
recognize. It may no doubt produce perplexity when 
the name of religion is given to that which wants some 
of the leading characteristics, which, not at some times 
or in some places only but all over Christendom, and 
from the primitive times of the Church, have been sup- 
posed to belong to religion. As described here religion 
does not brood over a future life, but is intensely occu- 
pied with the present; it does not surmise something 
behind nature, but contemplates nature itself; it does 
not worship a Power which suspends natural laws, but the 
Power which is exhibited in those laws ; it does not 
shrink from poHtical organization, but is itself the soul of 
all healthy poHtical organization ; it does not damp en- 
joyment, but is itself the principle of all rich enjoy- 
ment ; it is not self-conscious or self-absorbed and does 
not make us anxious about our own fate, but is the 
principle which destroys self and gives us strength to rise 
above personal anxieties. Undoubtedly, if this view be 
right many medieval saints must have been sadly wrong, 
and it must be admitted that for long periods strangely 
foreign elements must have been blended with religion. 
But after all not much less than this was asserted at the 
Reformation ; after all if we have here deserted the me- 
dieval ideal it has been for that of the Hebrew prophets 
down to the very end of the Hebrew period of religion. 
For their religion was social, political, historical, and 
supernaturalism was not the mainspring of it. 

But supernaturalism in religion is quite another thing 



RECAPITULATION. 249 

when it is not thus made the mainspring. If we have 
learnt to see our God in Nature rather than outside 
Nature it does not follow that we are to regard Him as 
limited by Nature, that is Nature as known to us. We 
are all supernaturalists thus far that we all believe in the 
existence of a world beyond our present knowledge. 
It is practical Supernaturalism when we allow this world 
beyond our science to influence us in thought, feeling, or 
action. We may do so by holding that though we have 
not science of it yet we have probabilities or powerful 
presentiments or, lastly, indications given through ex- 
ceptional unaccountable occurrences called miracles, 
which together make its existence practically important 
to us. 

And if we can think so, and if the news thus brought 
to us are good news, who will not say that a supernatural 
religion, thus supplementing a natural one, may be pre- 
cious, nay perhaps indispensable ? So much knowledge 
does our life need, and so little satisfying are the revela- 
tions of science, that to many, if not most, of those who 
feel the need of religion all that has been offered in this 
book will perhaps at first seem offered in derision. It 
will be inconceivable to them that religion can be mainly 
concerned with what all know and all admit. To them 
religion is only conceivable as a unique solace, or a prop 
in weakness, or a stay in the eddy, or a substance under 
the hollowness of life ; they do not associate it with 
happiness, health, or vigor, but exclusively with pain, 
decay, and death. They think of it as something added 
to life and knowledge, because life and knowledge fall 
so dismally short. This view is indeed mischievous so 
long as it is thus exclusive. It has often been pointed 



250 NATURAL RELIGION. 

out of late years that Religion loses its old commanding 
influence when it is thus monopolized by the miserable, 
that it becomes a melancholy partial thing, a mere make- 
shift for the science and practical energy which will in 
the end sweep the world clear of most of our present 
misery, and make life rich and satisfying through realities 
not through dreams. To this objection it maybe added 
that we cannot give such an infinite range to our hopes 
without also heightening our fears, for if we yield too 
much to the thought that " in a boundless universe there 
must be boundless better,' ' how can we help feeling at 
the same time that there must be ^' boundless worse"? 
With heaven comes hell, with transcendent hope an 
unnamable despair. But when this view ceases to be 
exclusive it acquires quite another character. When 
the supernatural does not come in to overwhelm the 
natural and turn life upside down, when it is admitted 
that religion deals in the first instance with the known 
and the natural, then we may well begin to doubt whether 
the known and the natural can suffice for human life. 
No sooner do we try to think so than pessimism raises 
its head. The more our thoughts widen and deepen, as 
the universe grows upon us and we become accustomed 
to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is the 
contrast of our own insignificance, the more contemptible 
become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the individual 
life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. For a while 
we comfort ourselves with the notion of self-sacrifice ; 
we say. What matter if I pass, let me think of others ! 
But the other has become contemptible no less than the 
self; all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, 
human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth in- 



RECAPITULATION. 



251 



creasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point, 
the spiritual city, '^ the goal of all the saints " dwindles to 
the " least of little stars " ; good and evil, right and wrong, 
become infinitesimal, ephemeral matters, while eternity 
and infinity remain attributes of that only which is outside 
the realm of morahty. Life becomes more intolerable 
the more we know and discover, so long as everything 
widens and deepens except our own duration, and that 
remains as pitiful as ever. The affections die away in a 
world where everything great and enduring is cold ; they 
die of their own conscious feebleness and bootlessness. 

Supernatural Religion met this want by connecting 
Love and Righteousness with eternity. If it is shaken 
how shall its place be supplied ? And what would Natural 
Religion avail then ? 

But still if religion fails us it is only when human life 
itself is proved to be worthless. It may be doubtful 
whether life is worth living, but if religion be what it has 
been described in this book, the principle by which alone 
life is redeemed from secularity and animalism, — so that 
every high thought and liberal sentiment, even if it ap- 
pear completely divorced from religion, is but a frag- 
ment which once had its place in the fabric of some 
religion and now awaits the time when it can be built in- 
to some new fabric of religion adapted to the coming 
time, — can it be doubtful that if we are to Hve at all we 
must live, and civilization can only live, by religion ? 



University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



By the same Author. 



ECCE HOMO. A Survey of the Life and Work of 
Jesus Christ. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50. A cheaper edition, 
i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

'* A very original and remarkable book, full of striking thought and delicate per- 
ception ; a book which has realized with wonderful vigor and freshfiess the histor- 
ical magnitude of Christ's work, and which here and there gives us readings of 
the finest kind of the probable motive of His individual words and actions." — 
Spectator. 

" If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a writer who has a right 
to claim deference from those who think deepest and know most." — Guardian. 

ROMAN IMPERIALISM, and other Lectures and 
Essays. i6mo. Cloth. Price, J1.50. 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STEIN ; or, Germany 
and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age. 2 volumes. 8vo. With 
portrait and maps. Price, J7.50. 

" In a notice of this kind scant justice can be done to a work like the one before 
us ; no short resume can give even the most meagre notion of the contents of 
these volumes, which contain no page that is superfluous, and none that is unin- 
teresting. Every day the interest attaching to the present political condition of 
Germany increases; every day we see more and more clearly the outlines of the 
great constitutional struggles, possibly of the revolution, that must surely soon 
come about. To understand the Germany of to-day, one must study the Germany 
of many yesterdays; and now that study has been made easy by this work, to 
which no one can hesitate to assign a very high place among those recent histories 
which have aimed at original research." — London AthencEum. 

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ERNST 
MORITZ ARNDT, the Singer of the German Fatherland. 
One volume. 8vo. Price, $2.25. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed^ post-paid, by the piiblishersy 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs, Roberts Brothers' Publications. 



ONESIMUS: 

MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF ST. PAUL. By 

the author of " Philochristus," &c. 

One volume. IGino. Price, S1.50. 

" The story Is skilfully told ; is plainly the result of learned and careful study of 
life throughout the then civilized world, the manners, customs, religious senti- 
ments and prejudices of the people, and the way in which Christianity got its 
beginnings in these countries. The life of Onesimus, not without its romance, 
with incidents of deeper interest, is such that he comes in contact with people in 
all the countries and cities mentioned in the New Testament history. As an historic 
study of the beginnings and early spread of Christianity it shows admirable insight. 
From the first paragraph to the last the story has a fascinating power. The style, 
slightly quaint, is yet remarkably simple, fresh, and pure. In some respects the 
book reminds one of ' Ecce Homo.' It is a similar endeavor on the part of the 
writer to put himself, and to place the reader, where the early dawn of Christian 
history shall seem to be a present and progressive fact. Many of the incidents 
and discussions are authentic, and the main impression is truthful. The reading 
of a work of this kind is, we think, helpful. The historic imagination needs 
quickening. It makes history itself appear more realistic. It may be read with 
special profit as a sort of running commentary on the book of the Acts.'* — Chicago 
A dvance. 

" Onesimus was the slave of Philemon ; but we know little more of him than 
what Is narrated in the epistle which he wrote to his master at the dictation of St. 
Paul. In the volume before us Onesimus tells the story of his life, — how he be- 
came a slave ; how he became the property of Philemon ; how he acquired his 
education ; what kind of society he mingled with ; how he fled from his master, 
who treated him like an equal ; how at Rome he met the great apostle and was 
by him brought into the fold of Christ, and how finally he obtained his liberty. 
Like 'Philochristus,' it is a romance ; but It is admirably constructed and beau- 
tifully written, and such is the air of verisimilitude throughout that it is difficult 
to resist the conviction that you are reading an actual autobiography of apostolic 
times. It is a work of great ability, and by many it will be found helpful in en- 
abling them to realize the life and experience of the followers of Jesus in the first 
half-century of our era." — New York Herald- 

*' It is a very graphic and life-like narrative, and undoubtedly renders for modern 
readers the spirit of the anoient times with considerable success. We think it 
will do good service, although we do not know that everything in It can be taken 
without qualification." — Congregationalist. 



Sold by all booksellers. Mailed^ post-paid, on receipt of price ^ by the 

publishers^ 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 






# : ^ -n,. 






>^' "^Z^, 






aO' 



